(Pascale Casanova, M. B. DeBevoise) World Republic of Letters

THE
WORLD
REPUBLIC
OF LETTERS
Pascale Casanova
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
200 4
BM0184954
AU rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
This book was originally publis,~ed;~{Ïa république mondiale des lettres, by

Éditions du Seuil, cOPYj;ig!It'© 1999 Éditions du Seuil, Paris.
,c,~
~, .,
Publication.of'tnis book has been aided by grants from the French

Ministt?~f Culture and the ]KW Foundation.
Library if Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Casanova, Pascale
[République mondiale des lettres. English]
The world republic of letters / Pascale Casanova:
translated by M.B. DeBevoise
p. cm. -- (Convergences)
Index index.
ISBN 0-674-01345-X (alk. paper)
1. European
literature-History and criticism. r. Title. II. Series.
PN703·C37132004
20040 54359
Designed by Amber Frid-]imenez

To my jather
CONTENTS
Prefoce to the English-Language Edition Xl
INTRODUCTION. THE FIGURE IN THE CAR PET
PART 1. THE LITERARY WORLD 7
1 1 Princip les of a World History of Literature 9

The Bourse of Literary Values
Literature, Nation, and Politics
2 1 The Invention of Literature 45

How to "Devour" latin
The Battle over French
The Cult of Language
The Empire of French
The Herderian Revolution
3 1 World Literary Space 82

Roads to Freedom
The Greenwich Meridian of Literature
Literary Nationalism
National versus International Writers
Forms of Literary Domination
4 1 The Fabric of the Universal 126
The Capital and Its Double
Translation as Littérarisation
Language Games
The Importance of Being Universal
Ethnocentrisms
Ibsen in England and in France
5 1 From Internationalism to Globalization 164
PART Il. UTERARY REVOLTS AND REVOLUTIONS 173

6 1 The Small Literatures 175
Literary Destitution
Political Dependencies
National Aesthetics
Kafka and the Connection with Politics
7 1 The Assimilated 205

Naipaul: The Need to Conform
Michaux: What Is a Foreigner?
Cioran: On the Inconvenience of Being Born in Romania
Ramuz: The Impossible Assimilation
8 1 The Rebels 220

Literary Uses of the People
National Tales, Legends, Po et ry, and Theater
Legacy Hunting
The Importation ofTexts
The Creation of Capitals
The International of Small Nations
9 1 The Tragedy of Translated Men 254

Thieves of Fire
Translated from the Night
Comings and Goings
Kafka: Translated from Yiddish
Creators of Languages
Literary Uses of the Oral Language
Andrade: The Anti-Camôes
Swiss Creoleness
V111 1 Contents
10 1 The Irish Paradigm 303
Yeats: The Invention ofTradition
The Gaelic League: Recreation of a National Language
Synge: The Written Oral Language
O'Casey: The Realist Opposition
Shaw: Assimilation in London
Joyce and Beckett: Autonomy
Genesis and Structure of a Literary Space
11 1 The Revolutionaries 324

Dante and the Irish
The Joycean Family
The Faulknerian Revolution
Toward the Invention of Literary Languages
CONCLUSION. THE WORLD AND THE LITERARY TROUSERS 348
Notes 357
Index 403
Contents 1 ix
Preface to the English-Language Edition
15 IT LEGITIMATE to speak of world literature? If so, how are we to take in

so huge a body of work and to make sense of it? Must one speak of liter-
ature, or ofliteratures? What theoretical instruments are available for an-
alyzing literary phenomena on this scale? Does the comparative study of
literature help us thinkabout such things in new terms?
In grappling with these questions it is not enough to geographically
enlarge the corpus of works needing to be studied, or to itnport eco-
nomic theories of globalization into the literary universe-still less to
try to provide an impossibly exhaustive enumeration of the whole of
world literary production. It is necessary instead to change our ordinary
way oflooking at literary phenomena.
As a result of the appropriation of literatures and literary histories by
political nations during the nineteenth century, although we do not al-
ways realize it, our literary unconscious is largely national. Our instru-
ments of analysis and evaluation are national. lndeed the study of litera-
ture almost everywhere in the world is organized along national lines.
This is why we are blind to a certain number of transnational phenom-
ena that have permitted a specifically literary world to gradually emerge
over the past four centuries or so. The purpose of this book is to restore
a point of view that has been obscured for the most part by the "nation-
alization" ofliteratures and literary histories, to rediscover a lost transna-
tional dimension of literature that for two hundred years has been re-
duced to the political and linguistic boundaries of nations.
This change of "vantage point" (to use Fernand Braudel's term) im-
plies a rnodification of the instruments used to measure, analyze, ap-
praise, understand, and compare texts. A change of literary lenses, as it
were, also involves retracing another history ofliterature: a non-national
history of strictly literary events, of the rivalries and competitions, the
subversions and conservative reactions, the revolts and revolutions that
have taken place in this invisible world.
In what fol1ows, then, 1 will speak not of world literature, but of inter-
national literary space, or else of the world republic of letters. By these
terms 1 mean that what needs to be described is not a contemporary
state of the world of letters, but a long historical process through which
internationalliterature-literary creation, freed from its political and na-
tional dependencies-has progressively invented itself.
The central hypothesis of this book, which borrows both Braudel's con-
cept of an "economy-world" and Pierre Bourdieu's notion of a "field,"
is that there exists a "literature-world," a literary universe relatively inde--
pendent of the everyday world and its political divisions, whose bound-
aries and operationallaws are not reducible to those of ordinary political
space. Exerted within this international literary space are relations of force
and a violence peculiar to them-in short, a literary domination whose
forms 1 have tried to describe while taking care not to confuse this
dornination with the fonns of political domination, even though it may
in many respects be dependent upon them.
This immense detour through transnational space has been under-
taken for the sole purpose of proposing a new tool for the reading and
interpretation of literary texts that may be at once, and without any
contradiction, internaI (textual) and external (historical). At bottorn it is
a rnatter of rejecting a difference in orientation that has long profoundly
divided literary studies, separating the practitioners of internal history-
on which "close reading," in particular, is founded-and the partisans of
an external history of literature. The method 1 propose, which consists
chiefly in situating a work on the basis of its position in world literary
space, will make it possible to understand, at least in part, not only texts
that more or less closely touch on the colonial or imperial question but
aiso works, such as those of Beckett and Kafka, that at first glance would
appear to be furthest removed frorn any historical or political determi-
nation. The effects ofliterary domination are so powerful, in fact, that by
XlI 1 Preface
exarnining thern it becomes possible to understand, above and beyond
historical variations, literary texts frorn dorninated regions of the world,
literarily dorninated regions arnong them.
The present work, employing theoretical tools SeldOIIl used until now
in literary criticism, is thus conceived as a sort of pivot between two tra-
ditions that until today have remained almost wholly foreign to each
other: the postcolonial critique, which has played an important role in
reintroducing history, and in particular political history, into literary the-
ory; and the French critical tradition, based exclusively on the internal
reading of texts, frozen in a certain aestheticizing attitude, refusing any
intrusion of history-and, a fortiori, of politics-in the supposedly
"pure" and purely formaI universe of literature. This is not, in my view,
an insuperable antinomy. 1 have tried to reconstruct the stages of a his-
torical process that illustra tes the relative dependence and independence
of literary phenomena with regard to poli tics. 1 have tried to show, in
other words, that the great writers have managed, by gradually detach-
ing themselves from historical and literary forces, to invent their literary
freedom, which is to say the Gonditions of the autonomy of their work.
Translation, despite the inevitable rnisunderstandings to which it gives

rise, is one of the principal means by which texts circulate in the literary
world. And so 1 am pleased that this book, aimed at inaugurating an in-
ternational literary criticism, should itself be internationalized through
translation into English. In this way its hypotheses will be able to be
scrutinized in a practical fashion, and its propositions debated at a truly
transnationallevel, by the various actors in internationalliterary space.
Critical texts, no less th an literary texts, need mediators and interme-
diaries in order to make their way in the world republic ofletters. In the
present instance it was Edward Said who played this rare and precious
role. 1 owe him an enorrnous debt of thanks. 1 would like also to express
my deepest gratitude to Jean Stein for her unfailing support, and to
thank Lindsay Waters for his patience.
PrEface 1 X111
Nos autem, cui mundus est patria ...
-DANTE
INTRODUCTION 1 The Figure in the Carpet
HENRY JAMES IS one of the few writers who dared to treat in literary
form, in "The Figure in the Carpet" (1896), the thorny and inexhaust-
ible question of the relationship between the writer (and therefore the
text) and his critics. But far from asserting the critic's powerlessness in
the face ofliterature, whose essential quality necessarily remains beyond
his grasp, James affirmed two principles contrary to the ordinary con-
ception of literary art: on the one hand, there is indeed an object to be
discovered in each work, and this is the legitimate task of criticism; on
the other, this "secret" is not something unsayable, some sort of superior
and transcendent essence that irnposes an ecstatic silence. James's meta-
phor of the figure, or pattern, in a carpet-"as concrete there," he em-
phasized, "as a bird in a cage, a bait on a hook, a piece of cheese in a
mouse trap"-was meant to suggest that there is something to be sought
in literature that has not yet been described. 1
Addressing the writer Verecker, whose "little point" he confesses has
always eluded his powers of hermeneutic subtlety, and the meaning
of whose work he confesses never to have understood, James's disap-
pointed critic asks: "Just to hasten that difficult birth, can't you give a
feilow a clue?" To this Verecker replies that the critic is perplexed only
because he has "never had a glimpse" of the "exquisite scheme" that
links ail his books: "If you had had one the element in question would
soon have becorne practicaily ail you'd see. To me it's exactly as palpable
as the marble of this chimney." His professional honor wounded, the
critic insists on reviewing one by one, with great diligence, ail the avail-
able critical hypotheses. "Is it a kind of esoteric message?" he asks, ven-
turing: "1 see-it's sorne ide a about life, sorne sort of philosophy"-per-
suaded that it is necessary to search texts for the expression of a deep
meaning that goes beyond their manifest sense. "Is it something in the
style or something in the thought? An element of form or an elernent of
feeling?" he queries-now embracing the useless dichoterny between
form and content. "Unless it be," the critic grasps in desperation, "sorne
kind of game you're up to with your style, sornething you're after in the
language. Perhaps it's a preference for the letter P! . . . Papa, pota-
toes, prunes-that sort of thing?"-thus proposing a purely formaI
hypothesis. 2
"There's an idea in my work," replies the novelist, "without which 1
wouldn't have given a straw for the whole job. It's the finest, fuilest in-
tention of the lot." This, the critic finaily succeeds in working out, is
sonlething "in the primaI plan; something like a complex figure in a
Persian carpet." The "right combination" of patterns "in ail their superb
intricacy" remain-like the purloined letter-exposed for ail to see and
yet at the same time invisible. "If my great affair's a secret," Verecker re-
fl.ected, "that's only because it is a secret in spite of itself ... 1 not only
never took the smailest precaution to keep it so, but never dreamed of
any such an accident."3
ln criticizing the critic and his usual assumptions, "The Figure in the
Carpet" invites a rethinking of the whole question of critical perspective
and of the aesthetic foundations on which it rests. In his feverish quest
for the secret of the writer's work, it never OCCllfS to Janles's critic to
question the nature of the questions that he puts to texts, to reconsider
his chief presupposition, which nonetheless is the very thing that blinds
him: the unexamined assumption that every literary work must be de-
scribed as an absolute exception, a sudden, unpredictable, and isolated
expression of artistic creativity. In this sense, the literary critic practices a
radical monadology: because each work is seen as being unique and irre-
ducible, a perfect unity that can be measured in relation only to itself,
the interpreter is obliged to contemplate the ensemble of texts that form
what is called the "history ofliterature" as a random succession of singu-
larities.
The solution that James proposes to the critic-discerning the "fig-
ure in the carpet," which is to say the pattern that appears only once its
2 1 THE WORlD REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

form and coherence are sudderùy seen to emerge from the tangle and
apparent disorder of a complex composition-is to be sought not above
and beyond the carpet itself, but by looking at it fromanotherpoint of .-
view. If one is prepared to shift one's perspective, to step away from a
paffitular text in order to examine it in relation to other texts, to try to
detect sirnilarities and dissirnilarities between them and look for recur-
ring patterns-in short, if one tries to take in the composition of the
carpet as a whole, to see it as a coherent design, then it becornes possible
to perceive the particularity of the pattern that one wishes to make ap-
pear. The persistent tendency of critics to isolate texts from one another
prevents thern from seeing in its entirety the configuration (to use
Michel Foucault's term) to which ail texts belong; that is, the totality of
texts and literary and aesthetic debates with which a particular work of
literature enters into relation and resonance, and which forms the true
basis for its singularity, its real originality.
Understanding a work of literature, then, is a matter of changing the
vantage point from which one observes it-oflooking at the carpet as a
whole. This is why, to extend James's metaphor, the "superb intricacy"
of the rnysterious work finds its expression in the ove rail pattern-invis-
ible and yet there for ail to see-of ail the literary texts through and
against which it has been constructed. On this view, everything that is
written, everything that is translated, published, theorized, commented
upon, celebrated-ail these things are so rnany elements of a vast com-
position. A literary work can be deciphered oilly on the basis of the
whole of the composition, for its rediscovered coherence stands revealed
oilly in relation to the entire literary universe of which it is a part. The
singularity of individualliterary works therefore bec ornes manifest oilly
against the background of the overail structure in which they take their
place. Each work that is declared to be literary is a minute part of the
immense" combination" constituted by the literary world as a whole.
What is apt to seem most foreign ta a work of literature, to its con-
struction, its form, and its aesthetic singularity, is in reality what gener-
ates the text itselC what permits its individual character to stand out. It is
the global configuration, or composition, of the carpet-that is, the do·-
rnain of letters, the totality of what 1 cali world literary space--that
alone is capable of giving meaning and coherence to the very form of
individual texts. This space is not an abstract and theoretical construc-
tion, but an actual-albeit unseen-world made up by lands of litera-
Introduction 1 3
ture; a world in which what is judged worthy ofbeing considered liter-
ary is brought into existence; a world in which the ways and means of
literary art are argued over and decided.
In this broader perspective, then, literary frontiers come into view
that are independent of political boundaries, dividing up a world that is
secret and yet perceptible by all (especiaily its rnost dispossessed me m-
bers); territories whose sole value and sole resource is literature, ordered
by power relations that nonetheless govern the form of the texts that are
written in and that circulate throughout these lands; a world that has its
own capital, its own provinces and borders, in which languages become
instruments of power. Each member of this republic struggles to achieve
recognition as a writer. Specifie laws have been passed freeing literature
from arbitrary political and national powers, at least in the most inde-
pendent regions. Rival languages compete for dominance; revolutions
are always at once literary and political. The history of these events can
be fathomed only by recognizing the existence of a literary measure of
time, of a "tempo" peculiar to literature; and by recognizing that this
world has its own present-the literary Greenwich meridian.
My purpose in analyzing the world republic ofletters is not to describe

ail of the world's literature, stilliess to propose an exhaustive and equaily
impossible critical rereading of it. The aim of this book is to bring about
a change o(pexspective: to describe the literary world "from a certain
vantagë~p~int," in the historian Fernand Braudel's phrase, which is to say
to change the point of view of ordinary criticism, to explore a universe
that writers themselves have always ignored;4 and to show that the
laws that govern this strange and immense republic-a world of rivalry,
struggle, and inequality-help illumina te in often radically new ways
even the most widely discussed works, in particular those of some of
the greatest literary revolutionaries of the twentieth century--Joyce,
Beckett, and Kafka, to be sure, but also, arnong others, Michaux, Ibsen,
Cioran, Naipaul, Kis, Faulkner, and Schmidt.
World literary space as a history and a geography-a space consti-
tuted by writers, who make and actually embody literary history-has
never been properly traced or described. The ambition of the interna-
tionalliterary criticism that 1 propose in the pages that foilow is to pro-
vide a specifically literary, yet nonetheless historical, interpretation of
texts; that is, to overcome the supposedly insuperable antinomy between
4 1 THE WORLD REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

·internaI cntlclsm, which looks no further than texts themselves in
searching for their meaning, and external criticism, which describes the
historical conditions under which texts are produced, without, however,
accounting for their literary quality and singularity. It therefore bec ornes
necessary to situate writers and their works in this irnmense territory,
which may be thought of as a sort of spatialized history.
Fernand Braudel, as he was preparing to write the economic history
of the world from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, noted
with regret that general works on this subject were typicaily "confined
to the European context." "1 am convinced," he said, "that history
would benefit irnmeasurably from comparisons made on the only valid
scale-that of the world ... [For] it is easier to make sense of the eco-
nomic history of the world than of the economic history of Europe
alone." At the same time he acknowledged that the analysis ofhistorical
phenomena on a world scale might be thought sufficiently daunting an
enterprise "to discourage the most intrepid and even the most naive."5 1
shail therefore heed Braudel's advice in what foilows, looking to the lit-
erary world as a whole in trying to account for the interdependence of
local phenomena, while respecting his counsel of caution and modesty.
Just the same, trying to make sense of a space of su ch gigantic complex-
ity rneans having to abandon ail the habits associated with specialized
historical, linguistic, and cultural research, ail the divisions between
disciplines-which, to sorne extent, justify our divided view of the
world-because only by going beyond these boundaries will it be possi-
ble to think outside conventional frameworks and to conceive ofliterary
space as a worldwide reality.
It was a writer and translator, Valery Larbaud, who more th an fifty
years ago was the first to hope for the advent of an "inteilectual Interna-
tional"6 and to have cailed, with a fine fearlessness, for a global approach
to literary criticism. To his mind it was necessary to break with the na-
tional habits of thought that create the illusion of uniqueness and insu-
larity, and above ail to erase the boundaries assigned by literary national-
isrn. The few attempts that until then had been made to describe world
literature, he observed in Sous l'invocation de saint Jérôme (Under the Pro-
tection of St. Jerome, 1944), amounted to "a simple juxtaposition of the
textbooks of different national literatures."7 But, he continued, "it is
quite plain that the future science of Literature-renouncing at last ail
criticism other than the descriptive-can lead only to the constitution
Introduction 1 5
of an ever-growing body of work that will answer to these two terms:
history and international."8 And it was Henry James who announced, as
the reward of such an enterprise, an approach to the meaning of texts
that was both novel and at the same time obvious-so obvious, in fact,
that there was not "the smallest reason why it should have been over-
looked": "It was great, yet so simple, was simple, yet so great, and the
final knowledge of it was an experience quite apart."9 The present work
therefore places itself under the dual patronage of Henry James and
Valery Larbaud.
6 1 THE WORlD REPUBLIC OF lETTERS

PART 1 1 The Literary World
Our historical study should set forth the circumstances relevant to ail the extant books of the
prophets, giving the life, character and pursuits of the author of every book, detailing who he
was, on what occasion and at what time and for whom and in what language he wrote.
Again, it should relate what happened to each book, how it was first received, into whose
hands it fell, how many variant versions there were, by whose decision it was received into
the canon, and, finally, how ail the books, now universally regarded as sacred, were united
into a single whole. Ali these details, 1repeat, should be available from an historical study of
Scripture.
-Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
1 1 Princip les C?f a World History of Literature
A civilization is a form of capital whose increase may continue for centuries.

-Paul Valéry, "Spiritual Freedom"
1am dismayed not to be able to lay out for Vou a more ample Catalogue of our good produc-
tions: 1do not accuse the Nation: it lacks neither spirit nor genius, but it has been delayed by
causes that have prevented it from growing up at the same time as its neighbors ... We are
ashamed that in certain genres we cannot equal our neighbors, [and 50] we desire through
tireless efforts to make up for the time that our calamities have caused us to lose ... Let us
therefore not imitate the poor who wish to pass for the rich, let us acknowledge our destitu-
tion in good faith; that this may encourage us instead to obtain by our own efforts the trea-
sures of Literature, whose possession will raise national glory to its full height.
-Frederick Il of Prussia, On German Literature
MANY WRITERS HAVE described, albeit partiaily and in quite diverse ways,
the difficulties associated with their position in the world of letters and
the problems they had to resolve in creating a place for themselves
within the peculiar economy of literature. But so great is the force of
denial and rejection in this world that ail works that in one way or an-
other address questions that are dangerous and prejudicial to the estab-
lished literary order find themselves immediately opposed. Since Du
Bellay, many authors have tried to expose the violent nature of literary
cornpetition-to show what is really at stake in it. A literaI reading of
their texts reveals the existence of an unsuspected world, which is to say
the world ofletters as it actually operates. But every use of terIT1S drawn
from the world of commerce, every assertion of the existence of "verbal
marketplaces" and "invisible wars" (Khlebnikov), every invocation of a
"world market of intellectual goods" (Goethe), every reference to "im-
mate rial wealth" or ta culture as a form of "capital" (Valéry), is firmly
denied and rejected by critics in favor of a ITletaphorical and "poetic"
interpretation.
The fact remains, however, that at different times and in different
places many of the most prestigious contestants in the game of letters
have sought to realistically describe w~a~ Valéry~,c~~ec! !he, "spiritual
economy" underlying the structure of the literary world. As grand strat-
egists of the economy peculiar to literature, they have not orùy suc-
ceeded in giving an exact, though inevitably incomplete, picture of the
laws of this economy; they have also created novel and unorthodox in-
struments for the analysis of their own literary practice. Even sa, no au-
thor-not even the most dominated, which is to say the most lucid, for
he alone is able to understand and describe his own position in the
world of letters-is aware of the general principle that generates the
structure he describes as a particular case. The prisoner of a particular
point of view, he glirnpses a part of the structure of the literary world
without, however, seeing it whole, because literary belief obscures the
very mechanism ofliterary domination. It is therefore necessary to con-
si der carefully what these writers have said, while deepening and sys-
tematizing sorne of their intuitions and most subversive ideas, in order to
give an adequate description of the international republic of letters.
What Valery Larbaud called the "politics of literature" has its own
ways and its own reasons, of which the politics of nations is unaware.
"There is a great difference," Larbaud observed in Ce vice impuni, la lec-
ture: Domaine anglais (Reading, This Unpunished Vice: English Domain,
1925), "between the political map and the intellectual map of the world.
The one changes its look every fifty years; it is covered with arbitrary
and uncertain divisions, and its major centers are constantly shifting.
The intellectual map, by contrast, changes slowly, and its boundaries dis-
play great stability ... Whence an intellectual politics that has almost no
relation to economic politics."l Fernand Braudel also noted a relative in-
dependence of artistic space with respect to economic (and therefore
political) space. In the sixteenth century, though Venice was the eco-
nomic capital of Europe, it was Florence and the Tuscan dialect that pre-
10 1 THE WORlD REPUBlIC OF lETTERS

vailed in the inteilectual sphere; in the seventeenth century, though Am-
sterdam was now the great center of European COll1merce, it was Rome
and Madrid that triumphed in the arts and in literature; in the eigh-
teenth century London becarne the center of the world economy, but it
was Paris that irnposed its cultural hegemony. "Similarly," Braudel re-
marked, "in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, France,
though lagging behind the rest of Europe economicaily, was the undis-
puted centre of Western painting and literature; the times when Italy
and Germany dominated the world of music were not tinles when Italy
or Germany dorninated Europe economicaily; and even today, the for-
rnidable economic lead [enjoyed] by the United States has not made it
the literary and artistic leader of the world."2 The key to understanding
how this literary world operates lies in recognizing that its boundaries,
its capitals, its highways, and its forrns of cornmunication do not com-
pletely coincide with those of the political and economic world.
Internationalliterary space was forrned in the sixteenth century at the
very moment when literature began to figure as a source of contention
in Europe, and it has not ceased to enlarge and extend itself since. Liter-
ary authority and recognition-and, as a result, national rivalries-came
into existence with the forrnation and development of the first Euro-
pean states. Previously confined to regional areas that were sealed off
frorn each other, Iiterature now emerged as a common battleground.
Renaissance ItaIy, fortified by its Latin heritage, was the first recognized
literary power. N ext carne France, with the rise of the Pléidade in the
mid-sixteenth century, which in challenging both the hegemony of
Latin and the advance of Italian produced a first tentative sketch of
transnational literary space. Then Spain and England, foilowed by the
rest of the countries of Europe, gradually entered into competition on
the strength of their own literary "assets" and traditions. The nationalist
rnovements that appeared in central Europe during the nineteenth cen-
tury-a century that also saw the arrivaI of North America and Latin
America on the international literary scene-generated new daims to
literary existence. Finally, with decolonization, countries in Africa, the
Indian subcontinent, and Asia demanded access to literary legitimacy
and existence as weil.
This world republic of letters has its own rnode of operation: its own
econorny, which produces hierarchies and various forms of violence;
and, above ail, its own history, which, long obscured by the quasi-
Principles of a World HistOly of Litera tu re 1 II

systematic national (and therefore political) appropnatIOn of literary
stature, has never really been chronicled. Its geography is based on the
opposition between a capital, on the one hand, and peripheral depend-
encies whose relationship to this center is defined by their aesthetic
distance frorn it. It is equipped, finaIly, with its own consecrating author-
ities,3 charged with responsibility for legislating on literary rnatters,
which function as the sole legitirnate arbiters with regard to questions of
recognition. Over time, owing to the work of a number of pioneering
figures rernarkable for their freedom from nationalist prejudice, an inter-
nationalliterary law came to be created, a specific fonn of recognition
that owes nothing to political fiat, interest, or prejudice.
But this immense realm, a hundred times surveyed yet always ignored,
has remained invisible because it rests on a fiction accepted by aIl who
take part in the game: the fable of an enchanted world, a kingdom of
pure creation, the best of aIl possible worlds where universality reigns
through liberty and equality. It is this fiction, proclaimed throughout the
world, that has obscured its real nature until the present day. In thrall to
the notion of literature as sornething pure, free, and universal, the con-
testants ofliterary space refuse to acknowledge the actual functioning of
its peculiar economy, the "unequal trade" (to quote Braudel once rnore)
that takes place within it. 4 In fact, the books produced by the least liter-
arily endowed countries are also the most improbable; that they yet
manage to emerge and make themselves known at ail verges on the rni-
raculous. The world of letters is in fact something quite different frorn
the received view ofliterature as a peaceful domain. Its history is one of
incessant struggle and competition over the very nature of literature it-
self-an endless succession of literary manifestos, movenlents, assaults,
and revolutions. These rivalries are what have created world literature.
THE BOURSE OF LlTERARY VALUES

Paul Valéry, seeking to describe the structure of intellectual cornrnerce
in terms of what he cailed a "spiritual economy," felt he had to justify
having recourse to the vocabulary of econornic life: "You see that 1 bor-
row the language of the stock exchange. It may seem strange, adapted to
spiritual things; but 1 fèel there is nothing better, and that there may be no
other way to express the relations of this kind} for both the spiritual econorny
and the material economy, when you pause to consider the Inatter, may

quite aptly be described as a conflict arnong valuations."5 In the sarne es-
say, "La liberté de l'esprit" (Spiritual Freedom, 1939), he went on to say:
1 say that there is a value cailed "spirit," as there is a value [assigned to]
oil, wheat, or gold. 1 have said value, because it involves appreciation and
judgments of importance, as weil as discussion about the price one is
prepared to pay for this value: spirit. One can invest in this value; one
can follow it, as the men at the Bourse say; one can observe its fluctua-
tions, in whatever quotations reflect people's opinion of it. In these
quotations, which are printed on every page of the newspapers, one
can see how it continuaily comes into competition with other values.
For there are competing values . . . Ali these values that rise and fail
constitute the great market ofhuman attairs.
"A civilization is a fonn of capital," he went on to say, "whose increase

may continue for centuries, like that of certain other forms of capital,
and which absorbs into itself its cornpound interest." Ail this, to Valéry's
mind, was evidence of "a wealth that has to be accumulated like natural
wealth, a capital that has to be formed by successive strata in people's
minds."6
Extending Valéry's line of thought to apply rnore precisely to the spe-
cific econorny of the world of letters, one may describe the competi-
tion in which writers are engaged as a set of transactions involving a
commodity that is peculiar to internationalliterary space, a good that is
demanded and accepted by everyone-a form of capital that Valéry
cailed "Culture" or "Civilization," which includes literary capital as weil.
Valéry believed that it is possible to analyze the course of a specifie com-
modity that is traded only in this "great market of human affairs," ap-
praising its value with reference to norms proper to the cultural world.
The recognition of this value, which is incornrnensurate with the values
of ordinary commerce, is the certain sign of the existence of an inteilec-
tuaI space, never identified as such, in which literary transactions take
place.
The literary economy is therefore based on a "market," to adopt
Valéry's term, which is to say a space in which the sole value recognized
by ail participants-literary value-circulates and is traded. But Valéry is
not the only one to have perceived, behind this apparently antiliterary
formulation, the functioning of the literary world. Before him Goethe
Principles of a fiVorld History of Literature 1 I3

had sketched the outlines of a literary world governed by new economic
laws, and described "a market where aIl nations offer their goods," a
"general intellectuai corrilllerce."7 As Antoine Berrrlan has observed,
"The appearance of a Weltliteratur was contemporaneous with that of a
Weltmarkt."8 The deliberate use of the vocabulary of commerce and
econornics in these texts was in no way metaphorical, no more for Goe-
the than for Valéry: Goethe, for his part, upheld the concrete notion of a
"commerce of ideas arnong peoples," referring to a "universal world
nlarket of exchange." At the sarne time he insisted on the necessity of
laying the foundations for a realistic view of literary cornmerce, free
fron1 flights of fancy that conceal the reality of cornpetition between na--
tions, without thereby reducing such commerce to purely econorrlÎc or
nationalist interests. This is why Goethe saw the translator as a central
actor in the world of letters, not only as an intermediary but also as a
creator of literary value: "It is thus necessary," he wrote, "to consider
each translator as a mediator seeking to promote this universal spiritual
commerce and setting himself the task of assisting its progress. Whatever
one may say of the inadequacy of translation, this activity nonetheless
remains one of the rnost essential tasks and one of the worthiest of es-
teelTI in the univers al rnarket of world trade."9
"Of what," Valéry asked, "is this capital called Culture or Civilization
composed? It is constituted first by things, material objects-books,
paintings, instruments, etc., which have their own probable lifespan,
their own fragility, the precariousness that things have."lo In the case of
literature, these rnaterial objects include texts--collected, catalogued,
and declared national history and property. Age is one of the chief as-
pects of literary capital: the older the literature, the more substantial a
country's patrimony, the rnore nmTIerous the canonical texts that consti-
tute its literary pantheon in the farm of "national classics."l1 The age of
a nationalliterature testifies to its "wealth"--in the sense of number of
texts-but also, and above aIl, to its "nobility," to its presumed or asserted
priority in relation to other national traditions and, as a result, to the
number of texts regarded as "classics" (works that stand above temporal
rivalry) or "universal" (works that transcend aIl particular attachments or
qualities). The narnes of Shakespeare, Dante, and Cervantes sUITilllarize
at once the greatness of a nationalliterary past, its historical and literary
legitimacy, and the universal (and therefore ennobling) recognition of its
I4 1 THE WORLD REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

greatest authors. The classics are the privilege of the oldest literary na-
tions, which, in elevating their foundational texts to the status of tirne-
less works of art, have defined their literary capital as nonnational and
ahistorical-a definition that corresponds exactly to the definition that
they have given ofliterature itself. The classic ernbodies the very notion
of literary legitirnacy, which is to say what is recognized as Literature:
the unit of nleasurement for everything that is or will be recognized as
literary.
Literary "prestige" also depends on the existence of a more or less ex-
tensive professional "rnilieu," a restricted and cultivated public, and an
interested aristocracy or enlightened bourgeoisie; on salons, a specialized
press, and sought-after publishers with distinguished lists who cornpete
with one another; on respected judges of talent, whose reputation and
authority as discoverers of unknown literary texts rnay be national or in-
ternational; and, of course, on celebrated writers wholly devoted to the
task of writing. In countries highly endowed with literary resources,
great writers can become literary "professionals": "Note these two con-
ditions," Valéry says. "In order for the rnaterial of a culture to constitute
capital, it is also necessary that there be men who have need of it and
who are able to make use of it ... and who know, on the other hand,
how to acquire and exercise what is necessary in the way of habits, intel-
lectual discipline, conventions, and practices for using the arsenal of doc-
uments and instruments that has been accumulated over the centu-
ries."12 This capital is therefore embodied by all those who transmit it,
gain possession of it, transform it, and update it. It exists in various
forms-literary institutions, academies,juries, critics, reviews, schools of
literature-whose legitimacy is measured according to the age and au-
thority of the recognition that they decree. Countries of great literary
tradition continually renew their literary patrimony, through the efforts
of all those who participate in it and who consider themselves account-
able for it.
Valéry's analysis can be made more precise by incorporating the "cul-
tural indicators" devised by Priscilla Clark Ferguson for the purpose of
comparing literary practices in various countries and measuring their
respective stocks of national capital. Ferguson analyzed not only the
number of books published each year, the sales of books, time spent
reading per inhabitant, financial assistance available for writers; but also
the number of publishers and bookstores, the number of writers whose
Principles ofa f;Vorld History ofLiterature 1 15

portraits appear on banknotes and starnps, the number of streets named
after farnous writers, the space allotted to books in the press, and the
tirne given over to books on television prograrns. 13 To ail these things, of
course, it is necessary to add the nurnber of translations of a nation's lit-
erary output and, above all, to take into account the fact that the "con-
centration of the production and publication of ideas," as Valéry put it
elsewhere, is not exclusively literary, since it depends to a large extent on
contacts between writers, rnusicians, and painters;14 that is, on the con-
junction of several types of artistic capital that works to enrich each one
ofthern.
Conversely, it is also possible to measure the relative lack, or even ab-
sence, of nationalliterary capital in certain countries. Thus the Brazilian
literary critic Antonio Candido describes what he calls the "cultural
weakness" of Latin Arnerica, noting the absence of almost all the things
just rnentioned: first, the high rate of illiteracy, which implies "the non-
exi~tence, dispersion, and weakness of publics disposed to literature, due
to the small nmnber of real readers"; in addition to this, "the lack of the
means of communication and diffusion (publishers, libraries, magazines,
newspapers)"; and, finally, "the impossibility, for writers, of specializing
in their literary jobs, generally therefore realized as marginal, or even
amateur, tasks."15
Besides its relative age and volume, another characteristic of literary
capital is that it rests on judgments and reputations. The amount of
"credit" that is extended to a space endowed with a great "immaterial
wealth" depends on "people's opinion," as Valéry says-that is, on the
degree of recognition that is granted it and on its legitimacy. The place
reserved for economics by Ezra Pound in his Cantos is well known; also
in his ABC of Reading (1934), in which he affirmed the existence of an
economy internaI to ideas and to literature: "Any general statement is
like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to
meet it. If Mr. Rockefeller draws a cheque for a million dollars it is
good. If l draw one for a million it is a joke, a hoax, it has no value ...
The sarne applies with cheques against knowledge ... You do not ac-
cept a stranger's cheques without reference. In writing, a man's 'name' is
his reference. He has, after a time, credit."16 The ide a ofliterary credit in
Pound's sense makes it possible to see how value in the literary world is
directly related to belief.17 When a writer becomes known, when his
name has acquired value in the literary market-which is to say, once it

is believed that what he has written has literary value, once he has
gained acceptance as a writer-then credit is given to him. Credit-
Pound's "reference"-is the power and authority granted to a writer by
virtue of the belief that he has earned his "name"; it is therefore what he
believes himself to have, what others believe him to have, and conse-
quently the power to which it is agreed he is entitled. "We are," as Valéry
says, "what we think we are and what we are believed to be."18
The existence, at once concrete and abstract, of this literary capital-
this "spiritual gold," in Larbaud's phrase-is therefore possible only by
virtue of the very belief that sustains it and of the real and tangible ef-
fects of this belief, which supports the functioning of the entire literary
world. Ali participants have in common a belief in the value of this as-
set-an asset that not everyone possesses, or at least not to the same de-
gree, and for the possession of which everyone is prepared to struggle.
Literary capital is both what everyone seeks to acquire and what is uni-
versally recognized as the necessary and sufficient condition of ta king
part in literary competition. This fàct rnakes it possible to measure liter-
ary practices against a standard that is universally recognized as legiti-
rnate. Literary capital so surely exists, in its very immateriality, only be-
cause it has-for all those who take part in the competition, and above
all for those who are deprived of capital-objectively measurable effects
that serve to perpetuate this belief. The imnlense profit that writers
frorn literarily ünpoverished spaces have obtained in the past,19 and still
ob tain today, from being published and recognized in the major cen-
ters-through translation and the prestige conferred by imprints that
symbolize literary excellence, the distinction that accompanies a formaI
introduction of an unknown writer by an internationally renowned au-
thor, even the award of literary prizes-supplies evidence of the real ef-
fects ofliterary belief.
Literariness
Language is another major component of literary capital. The political
sociology oflanguage studies the usage and relative "value" oflanguages
only in political and econornic terms, ignoring that which, in the world
of letters, defines their linguistic and literary capital-what 1 propose to
cail literariness. 20 Certain languages, by virtue of the prestige of the texts
written in them, are reputed to be more literary than others, to embody
literature. lndeed, literature is so closely linked to language that there is a
Prin.ciples of a fiVorld History cifLiterature 1 17

tendency to identify the "language ofliterature"-the "language of Ra-
cine" or the "language ofShakespeare"-with literature itself. For a lan-
guage to acquire a high degree ofliterariness it has to have a long tradi-
tion, one that in each generation refines, rnodifies, and enlarges the
gamut of fonnal and aesthetic possibilities of the language, establishing,
guaranteeing, and cailing attention to the literary character of what is
written in it. This tradition f1.1nctions, in effect, as a certificate of literary
value.
Literary value therefore attaches to certain languages, along with
purely literary effects (notably connected with translation) that cannot
be reduced to the strictly linguistic capital possessed by a particular lan-
guage or to the prestige associated with the use of a particular language
in the worlds of scholarship, politics, and economics. This sort of value
must be clearly distinguished from what political sociologists who study
the "emergent world language systern" rnean when they refer to indica-
tors_ of a language's centrality.21 Depending on the history of a language
and the country in which it is spoken, as weil as on the literature written
in it and the position it occupies in world literary space, the literary her-
itage of a language is linked also to a set of techniques devised over the
course of centuries-poetical and narrative fonns and constraints, the
results of formaI investigations, theoretical debates, and stylistic innova-
tions-·-that enrich its range of possibilities. As a consequence, literary
and linguistic wealth operates through both ide as and things, through
beliefs and through texts.
It is for this reason that certain authors writing in "smail" languages
have been tempted to introduce within their own national tongue not
only the techniques, but even the sounds, of a reputedly literary lan-
guage. Frederick II, king of Prussia, published in Berlin in I780 a brief
essay in French (the text appeared some time later in a German trans-
lation by a civil servant of the Prussian state) titled De la littérature
allemande) des dlfauts qu) on peut lui reprocher, quelles en sont les causes) et par
quels moyens on peut les corriger (On German Literature, the Defects for
Which It May Be Reproached, the Causes of These, and byWhat
Means They May Be Corrected). Through an extraordinary accord of
language and argurnent, the German rnonarch cailed attention to the
specificaily literary domination exercised by French over German letters
at the end of the eighteenth century.22 Accepting this predorninance
as something altogether obvious-and so forgetting the great works in
18 1 THE WORLD REPUBlIC OF LETTERS

the German language by poets and writers such as Klopstock, Lessing,
Wieland, Herder, and Lenz-he regarded the reform of the German
language as the necessary condition of giving birth to a classical German
literature. To carry out his prograrn for "perfecting" the GenTlan lan-
guage-a "half-barbarous" and "unrefined" tongue that he accused of
being "diffuse, difficult to handle, unpleasing to the ear," by contrast
with "elegant" and "polished" languages-Frederick II proposed to Ital-
ianize (or Latinize) it: "We have a great quantity of auxiliary and active
verbs whose final syllables are dull and disagreeable, su ch as sagen} geben}
nehmen: put an 'a' after these endings and make them sagena} gebena}
nehmena} and these sounds will flatter the ear."23
ln the same way, Rubén Dario, the founder of modernismo} undertook
at the end of the nineteenth century to import the French language into
Castilian; that is, to transfer into Spanish the literary resources of French.
The Nicaraguan poet's boundless admiration for the French literature of
his time-Hugo, Zola, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Catulle Mendès-Ied hirn to
invent a technique he called "mental Gallicisnl." "The adrniration that 1
have felt for France for as long as 1 can remember," he wrote in an article
published in La Nacion of Buenos Aires in 1895, "is immense and pro-
found. My drearn was always to write in French ... And this is how it
came about that, thinking in French and writing in a Castilian whose
purity the academicians of Spain approved, 1 published the slender vol-
ume that was to initiate the present American literary rnovement."24
The Russian poet Ve1irnir Khlebnikov, who in the second decade of the
twentieth century sought to achieve universal recognition for the Rus-
sian language and Russian poetry, introduced the notion of "verbal
marketplaces."25 Describing the inequalities of linguistic and literary
commerce with unusual acuteness, by means of an econOlnic analogy
surprising for its realism, he wrote:
Nowadays sounds have abandoned their past funetions and serve the
purposes ofhostility; they have become differentiated auditory instru-
ments for the exchange of rational wares; they have divided multilin-
gual mankind into diffèrent eamps involved in tariff wars, into a series
of verbal marketplaces beyond whose confines any given language
loses currency. Every system of auditory curreney daims supremacy,
and so language as sueh serves to disunite mankind and wage spectral
wars. 26
Principles qfa World History of Literature 1 I9

What is needed, then, is an index or measure ofliterary authority that
can account for the linguistic struggles in which ail contestants in the
game ofliterature take part without even knowing it, by virtue sirnply of
belonging to such a linguistic area, and clarifY the mediating role of texts
and translations, the nlaking and breaking of reputations, and the process
ofliterary consecration and excomrnunication. Such an index would in-
corporate a number of factors: the age, the "nobility," and the number
of literary texts written in a given language, the number of universally
recognized works, the number of translations, and so on. It therefore
becomes necessary to distinguish between languages that are associ-
ated with "high culture"-languages having a high degree of literary
value-and those that are spoken by a great many people. The forrner
are languages that are read not only by those who speak thern, but also
by readers who think that authors who write in these languages or who
are translated into them are worth reading. They amount to a kind of
licence, a permit of circulation certifYing an author's rnembership in a
literary circle.
One way to devise such an index, in order to measure the strictly lit-
erary power of a language, would be to transpose the criteria used by
political sociology to the literary world. Considering the set of world
languages as an emergent system that derives its coherence from multi-
lingualism, Abram de Swaan argues that the political centrality of a lan-
gllage--or, as 1 wish to say, the volume of its strictly linguistic capital-
can be determined by the number of multilingual speakers it has: the
greater the number of polyglots who speak a language, the more central,
or dominant, the language iS. 27 In other words, even in the political
sphere, the fact that a language has a large number of speakers does not
suffice to establish its central character in the system, which exhibits
what Swaan calls a "floral figuration"-a pattern in which ail the lan-
guages of the periphery are linked to the center by polyglots. "Potential
communication," or the extent of a linguistic territory, is "the product
of the proportion of speakers of a language among all speakers in the
(sub )system and the proportion of speakers of that language among the
rnultilingual speakers in the (sub )system, that is, the product of its 'plu-
rality' and its 'centrality,' indicating respectively its size and its position
within the (sub )system."28 By similarly conceiving the literary world in
terms of a floral pattern, which is to say as a system in which the litera-
tures of the periphery are linked to the center by polyglots and transla-

tors, it becomes possible to rneasure the literariness (the power, prestige,
and volurne of linguistic and literary capital) of a language, not in terms
of the nurnber of writers and readers it has, but in terms of the number
of cosmopolitan interrnediaries-publishers, editors, critics, and espe-
ciaily translators-who assure the circulation of texts into the language
or out of Ît. 29
Cosmopolitans and Polyglots

The great, often polyglot, cosmopolitan figures of the world of letters
act in effect as foreign exchange brokers, responsible for exporting from
one territory to another texts whose literary value they deterrnine by
virtue of this very activity. Valery Larbaud, himself a notable cosmopoli-
tan and a great translator, described these rnen and wornen as members
of an invisible society-Iegislators, as it were, of the Republic ofLetters:
There exists an aristocracy open to ail, but which has never been very
numerous, an invisible, dispersed aristocracy, devoid of external signs,
without officially recognized existence, without diplomas and with-
out letters patent, and yet more brilliant than any other; without tem-
poral power and yet possessing considerable authority, su ch that it has
often led the world and determined the future. From it have come the
most truly sovereign princes that the world has known, the only ones
who for years-in sorne cases, centuries-after their death direct the
actions of many men. 30
The power of this "aristocracy" can be measured only in literary

terms. For its "considerable authority" consists in the supreme power to
decide what is literary, and lastingly to recognize, or to consecrate, ail
those whom it designates as great writers: those who, in a strict sense,
make literature; whose work incarnates (in sorne cases for" centuries af..
ter their death") literary greatness itself in the form of universal classics,
and sets the lirnits and standards of what is and will be considered liter-
ary----thus literally becorning the model for ail future literature. This so-
ciety of letters, Larbaud continues,
is one and indivisible in spite ofboundaries, and literary, pictorial, and

musical beauty is for it something as true as Euclidian geometry is
for ordinary minds. One and indivisible because it is, in each country,
that which is at the same time the most national and the most inter-
national: the most national, since it incarnates the culture that has
Principles of a World History ofLiterature 1 2I

brought together and formed the nation; and the most international,
since it can find its like, its level, its milieu, only among the elites of
other nations ... Thus it is that the opinion of a German who is suf-
ficiently well-read to be acquainted with literary French will probably
coincide, with respect to any French book whatever, with the opinion
of the French elite and not with the judgment of Frenchmen who are
not literarily minded. 31
The stature of these great intermediaries, whose immense power of

consecration, of deterrnining literary quality, is a function of their very
independence, therefore derives from the fact that they are citizens of a
particular nation, which paradoxically supplies the basis for their literary
autonorny. Collectively they form a society that, in conforrnity with the
law of literary autonomy, disregards political, linguistic, and national di-
visions-a world that, as Larbaud says, is one and "indivisible in spite
of boundaries"-and sanctions texts in accordance with an analogous
pri~ciple of indivisibility in literature. By rescuing texts from imprison-
ment within literary and linguistic boundaries, they lay down auton-
omous-that is, nonnational, international--criteria of literary legiti-
macy.
Thus it becomes clear why critics are regarded as creators of literary
value. Valéry, who assigns thern responsibility for evaluating texts, uses
the word "judges" in praising
these connoisseurs, these invaluable amateurs who, if they do not cre-

ate the works themselves, create their true value; these ... passionate,
but incorruptible,judges, for whom or against whom it is a fine thing
to work. They know how to read: a virtue that has been lost. They
know how to hear, and even how to listen. They know how to see.
This is to say that what they insist on rereading, rehearing, and resee-
ing is constituted, by this act of going back, as a sound value. Universal
capital increases as a result. 32
By virtue of the fact that the competence of cri tics is acknowledged by

aIl members of the literary world, including the rnost prestigious and the
most reted figures (such as Valéry), the judgments and the verdicts that
they deliver-consecration or anathema-have objective and measur-
able effects. The recognition ofJarnes Joyce by the highest authorities of
the literary world established him right away as a founder of literary
rnodernity, transforming him into a sort of standard of measurement

against which the work of other authors was reckoned. By contrast, the
excornrnunication pronounced against Charles Ferdinand Rarnuz (al-
though he was unquestionably one of the first, before Céline, to exploit
the resources of spoken French in fictional narration) relegated him to
the heil of minor provincial roles in French literature. The huge power
of being able to say what is literary and what is not, of setting the lirrrits
of literary art, belongs exclusively to those who reserve for themselves,
and are granted by others, the right to legislate in literary rrlatters.
Translation, like criticisrn, is a process of establishing value-what
Larbaud cails enrichment: "At the sarne tirrle as he increases his inteilec-
tuaI wealth, [the translator] enriches his national literature and honors
his own name. Bringing over into a language and a literature an impor-
tant work from another literature is not an obscure enterprise devoid of
grandeur."33 Similarly, as Valéry argues, the "sound value" that arises
from the recognition conferred by true criticisrrl makes it possible to in-
crease literary wealth by adding the value of newly recognized works to
the existing stock of capital held by those who recognize it. Critics, like
translators, thus contribute to the growth of the literary heritage of na-
tions that enjoy the power of consecration: critical recognition and
translation are weapons in the struggle by and for literary capital. But the
case of Valery Larbaud shows that these great intermediaries are naively
cornrnitted to a pure, dehistoricized, denationalized, and depoliticized
conception of literature; more than anyone in the world of letters, they
are firmly convinced of the universality of the aesthetic categories in
terms of which they evaluate individual works. More than anyone else,
they are responsible for the misunderstandings and misreadings that
characterize the literary recognition conferred by the leading centers
(and particularly, as we shall see, Paris)-misreadings that are evidence of
the ethnocentric blindness of these centers.
Paris: City of Literature

As against the national boundaries that give rise to political belief and
nationalist feeling, the world of letters creates its own geography and its
own divisions. The territories ofliterature are defined and delimited ac-
cording to their aesthetic distance frorn the place where literary conse-
cration is ordained. The cities where literary resources are concentrated,
where they accumulate, become places where belief is incarnated, cen-
ters of credit, as it were. lndeed, they may be thought of as central banks
Princip les of a VVorld History if Literature 1 23

of a specific sort: thus Rarrmz described Paris as "the universal bank of
foreign exchange and corrlillerce" in literature. 34 The ernergence and
universal recognition of a literary capital, which is to say of a place
where literary prestige and belief converge in the highest degree, is a di-
rect result of such belief. The existence of a literary center is therefore
twofold: it exists both in the irrlaginations of those who inhabit it and in
the reality of the measurable effects it produces.
And so it was that Paris became the capital of the literary world, the city
endowed with the greatest literary prestige on earth. It was, as Valéry put
it, a necessary "fiulCtion" of the structure of the literary world. 35 As the
capital of France, Paris corrlbined two sets of apparently antithetical
properties, in a curious way bringing together ail the historical concep-
tions of freedom. On the one hand, it sYlnbolized the Revolution, the
overthrow of the monarchy, the invention of the rights of man-an im-
age. that was to earn France its great reputation for tolerance toward for-
eigners and as a land of asylum for political refilgees. But it was also the
capital of letters, the arts, luxurious living, and fashion. Paris was there-
fore at once the inteilectual capital of the world, the arbiter of good
taste, and (at least in the mythological account that later circulated
throughout the entire world) the source of political democracy: an ide-
alized city where artistic freedom could be proclaimed and lived.
Political liberty, elegance, and inteilectuality constituted a unique
configuration, both historical and mythical, that Inade it actuaily possi-
ble to invent and to perpetuate the liberty of art and of artists. Victor
Hugo, perhaps the most eminent of the Inany contributors to the Paris
Guide of l 867, identified the French Revolution as the city's major form
of "symbolic capital"-what set it apart frorn ail other cities. Without
I789, he wrote, the suprernacy of Paris is an enigma: "Rome has more
majesty, Trier is older, Venice is more beautiful, Naples more graceful,
London wealthier. What, then, does Paris have? The Revolution ... Of
ail the cities of the earth, Paris is the place where the flapping of the im-
mense invisible sails of progress can best be heard."36 For a very long
time, until at least the I960s, the irrlage of Paris was bound up with the
rnemory of the French Revolution and the uprisings of l 830, l 848, and
I870-7I; with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and respect for the
principle of the right to asylunl; but also with the great "heroes" ofliter-
ature. Nearly a century after Hugo composed his tribute to Paris, the

Gennan writer Georg K. Glaser recaIled: "In my srnaIl homeland, the
narne 'Paris' had the ring oflegend about it. My later readings and expe-
riences did not rob it ofthis splendor. It was the city of Henri Heine, the
city of]ean-Christophe, the city of Hugo, of Balzac, of Zola, the city of
Marat, Robespierre, Danton, the city of eternal barricades and of the
Commune, the city of love, of light, of lightness, laughter, and pIe a-
sure." 37
Other cities, notably Barcelona, which during the years under Franco
acquired a reputation for relative political tolerance and became a great
inteIlectual capital, may seem to have characteristics sirnilar to those of
Paris. But the Catalan capital served as a literary center only on a na-
tional scale-or, in a broader sense, as a literary center of a linguistic area,
if one includes the Spanish-speaking countries of Central and South
America. Paris, on the other hand, owing to the extent of its literary
resources, unrivaled in Europe, and to the exceptional nature of the
French Revolution, played a special role in creating a world literary
space.Walter Benjamin, in Das Passagen-lilkrk (The Arcades Project,
1927-1939), showed that the historical particularity of Paris was con-
nected with the dernand for political freedorn, which in turn was di-
rectly associated with the invention of literary modernity: "Paris is a
counterpart in the social order to what Vesuvius is in the geographic or-
der: a menacing, hazardous massif, an ever-active hotbed of revolution.
But just as the slopes of Vesuvius, thanks to the layers of lava that coyer
them, have been transformed into paradisal orchards, so the lava of revo-
lutions provides uniquely fertile ground for the blossorning of art, festiv-
ity, fashion."38 In his letters, Benjarnin also referred to the "infernal
worldview" of the nineteenth-century French socialist and revolution-
ary theorist Louis Auguste Blanqui, which he saw as bearing an "ob-
scure and profound relationship to Baudelaire"; together, Blanqui and
Baudelaire symbolized-indeed personified-the connection between
literature and revolution. 39
This unique configuration was reinforced by literature itself. lnnumera-

ble descriptions in novels and poerns of Paris in the nineteenth and,
especially, the twentieth century made the city's literariness manifest.
Roger Caillois noted the "fabulous picture of Paris that the novels of
Balzac in particular, as weIl as those of Eugène Sue and Ponson de
Terrail, helped to popularize."40 lndeed, Paris had become synonymous
Prindples of a World History of Literature 1 25
BM0184954
with literature, transformed through the evocations of novelists and po-
ets into a character in its own right, a novelistic place par excellence-
one thinks of Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris (1828-31); Balzac's Le Père
Coriot (1835), Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions, 1837-1843), and Splendeurs
et misères des courtisanes (SpI endors and Miseries of Courtesans, 1838-
1847); Sue's Les mystères de Paris (1842-43); Baudelaire's Le spleen de Paris
(1869); Zola's La Curée (The Spoils, 1871) and Le ventre de Paris (The
Belly of Paris, 1873). Paris in sorne sense objectified-almost proved-
its uniqueness in a special and irrefutable way. "The city of a hundred
thousand novels," as Balzac called it, literarily embodied literature. Un-
derlying the indissoluble link between literature and politics that sup-
plied the basis for its unique power was the classic tableau of revolu-
tionary Paris. It might in fact be said that the descriptions of popular
uprisings in Hugo's Les Misérables (1862) and Quatre-vingt-treize (Ninety-
three, 1874), Flaubert's Véducation sentimentale (Sentimental Education,
1869), and Vallès's L'Insurgé (The Insurrectionist, 1886) condense aIl the
inlages on which the legend of Paris rests. By its ability to convert great
political events into literature, Paris further strengthened belief in its
preeminent position as the capital of the literary world.
These countless descriptions of Paris-a literary genre inaugurated in

the late eighteenth century-were gradually codified, so that over time
they amounted (to use Daniel Oster's term) to a "recitation"-an im-
mutable leitmotif: obligatory in fonu and content, that sang the glories
and virtues of Paris by casting the city as a miniature version of the
world. 41 The extraordinary repetition of this exaggerated discourse is
evidence of the long but steady accumulation of a literary and intellec-
tuaI heritage peculiar to Paris, since symbolic resources are able to in-
crease only once they are believed to exist, which is to say once the
number ofbelievers reaches a certain level; and since the recitation of its
glories, by virtue of being repeated as something obvious, gradually
cornes to acquire a reality of its own.
Ali authors, French and foreign alike, who have attempted to describe,
understand, and define the essence of Paris have fàithfully echoed the
inexhaustible refrain of the city's uniqueness and universality-an exer-
cise in style that developed over a virtually unbroken period lasting
more than one hundred fifly years, frorn the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury until at least 1960, and swiftly became a set routine for anyone who

aspired to be a writer. 42 Thus Edrnond Texier, in describing Paris in his
preface to the celebrated Tableau de Paris (Picture of Paris, 1852) as
"surnrnary of the world," "humanity rnade city," "cosmopolitan forum,"
"grand Pandernonium," "encyclopedic and universal city," was only re-
peating a series of fonnulas that were already clichés. 43 Comparison
with the great capitals of world history was a favored (and indeed hack-
neyed) method of calling attention to Paris. Valéry was later to cornpare
it with Athens and Alberto Savinio with Delphi, the navel of the
world;44 the Gennan essayist and critic Ernst Curtius, in Die franzosische
K"ultur (French Culture, 1930), preferred Rome: "Ancient Rome and
nlOdern Paris are both unique examples of the fact that the political
capital of a great state can become the central point of the whole of its
national and intellectuallife, and that it can also gain worldwide impor-
tance as a cosmopolitan center of culture."45 It was not until the therne
of the apocalyptic destruction of Paris-an obligatory aspect of chroni-
des and evocations of Paris throughout the nineteenth century46-
gained currency that it became possible to raise the city, through the
tragic fate that awaited it, to the rank of the great rnythical cities, Nine-
vah, Babylon, and Thebes: "All the great cities have met a violent death,"
wrote Maxime Du Camp. "World history is the account of the destruc-
tion of great capitals; these excessive and hydrocephalic bodies seem
fated to disappear in catadysms."47 To evoke the disappearance of Paris
was therefore only a way of rnaking it appear still greater than it was and,
by snatching it from the dutches of history, of elevating it to the rank of
universal myth. 48
Thus Roger Caillois, for example, in his study of Balzac, called Paris a
modern nlyth created by literature. 49 It is for this reason that historical
chronology is of little importance: the cornrnonplaces of descriptions of
Paris are transnational and transhistorical. They are a measure of the
form and the dissemination of literary belief. Descriptions of Paris are
hardly the privilege of French writers-belief in the special supremacy
of Paris quickly spread throughout the world. The accounts of Paris
composed by foreigners and brought back to their own countries be-
came remote vehides for belief in its literary power. The Yugoslav
writer Danilo Kis rernarked that the legend of Paris on which he had
been brought up was less the invention of French literature and poetry,
with which he was thoroughly acquainted, th an of Yugoslav and Hun-
garian poets:
Principles ofa VVorld History ofLiterature 1 27

It suddenly became clear to me that 1 had not constructed the Paris of
my dreams fi'om [reading] the French, but that-curiously and para-
doxically-it was a foreigner who had inoculated me with the poison
of nostalgia ... 1 thought of ail those survivors of shipwrecked hopes
and dreams who had cast anchor in a Parisian haven: Matos, Tin
Ujevié, Bora Stankovié, Crnjanski ... But Ady 50 was the only one
who succeeded in expressing and putting into verse all these nostal-
gias, all the dreams of poets who had prostrated themselves before
Paris as though before an icon. 51
Writing on the occasion ofhis first trip to Paris, in 1959, Kis captured
this wholly "literacized" vision-this conviction of having attained the
very seat ofliterature-better than any of them:
1 did not come to Paris as a foreigner, but as someone who goes on a
pilgrimage in the innermost landscapes of his own dreams, in a terra
nostalgia . . . The panoramas and sanctuaries of Balzac, the naturalist
"underbelly of Paris" of Zola, the spleen of Baudelaire's Paris in the
Petits poèmes en prose as weil as its old women and its half-breeds, the
thieves and the prostitutes in the bitter perfume of the Fleurs du mal,
the salons and the fiacres of Proust, the Pont Mirabeau of Apollinaire
. . . Montmartre, Pigalle, the Place de la Concorde, the Boulevard
Saint-Michel, the Champs-Élysées, the Seine ... all these were only
pure impressionist canvases spattered with sunlight whose names en-
livened my dreams ... Hugo's Les Misérables} the revolutions, the barri-
cades, the murmur of history, poetry, literature, the cinema, music, all
these things were mixed together and boiling over, ail ablaze in my
head before 1 set foot in Paris. 52
Octavio Paz, in Vislumbres de la India (In Light oflndia, 1995), recalled

his discovery of Paris in the late 1940S as a sort of materialization of
what until then had been purely literary acquaintance: "Exploration
and recognition: in my walks and rambles l discovered new places and
neighborhoods, but there were others that l recognized, not by sight but
from novels and poems. Paris for me is a city that, more than invented, is
reconstructed by memory and the imagination."53 The Spanish writer
Juan Benet testified in his own way to the sarne attraction:
1 believe it is fair to say that between I945 and I960 Paris still focused
the attention of almost all the artists and students [of Madrid] ... Only
muffied echoes of the culture of the interwar period could any longer

be heard. Paris after the war still occupied the privileged place that
Spanish liberals had traditionally reserved for it ... Paris still retained a
bit of the multifaceted chann that it had exercised since 1900, and not
only as the sole place where the awkward Spanish naiveté would not
do, summed up in the seductive invitation of the nightclubs to young
people: Come in here and you will see Paris.
Beyond this attraction, new ones were added after the war: on the
one hand, the anti-Francoist hospitality and the possibility of carrying
on the ideological war against the dictatorship from there and, on the
other, the b.lrious and nocturnal modernity of existentialism, which,
having no rivaIs, for many years was to have a monopoly on academic
anticonformism. 54
This irnprobable combination of qualities lastingly established Paris,

both in France and throughout the world, as the capital of a republic
having neither borders nor boundaries, a universal homeland exenlpt
from aIl professions of patriotisrn, a kingdom of literature set up in op-
position to the ordinary laws of states, a transnational realrn whose sole
imperatives are those of art and literature: the universal republic of let-
ters. "Here," wrote Henri Michaux with reference to Adrienne Mon-
nier's bookshop, one of the chief places ofliterary consecration in Paris,
"is the homeland of [aIl] those free spirits who have not found a home-
land."55 Paris therefore became the capital of those who proclaimed
themselves to be stateless and above politicallaws: in a word, artists. "In
art," Brancusi said to Tzara during a meeting at the Closerie des Lilas in
1922, "there are no foreigners."56 The almost systematic appearance of
the therne of universality in evocations of Paris is one of the nl0st con-
clusive proofs of its status as literary capital of the world. It is because this
universality was universaIly acknowledged (or very nearly so) that Paris
came to be invested with the power of conferring universal recognition,
which in turn affected the course of literary history. Valery Larbaud, in
Paris de France (1925), drew a portrait of the ideal cosrnopolitan (whose
independence he was anxious to reaffirm after the closing of national
ranks during the war of 1914-1918):
. . . the Parisian whose horizon extends far beyond his city; who
knows the world and its diversity, who knows at least his continent,
the neighboring islands ... who is not content to be from Paris ...
And all this for the greater glory of Paris, so that nothing may be for-
Principles of a lMJrld History ofLiterature 1 29

eign to Paris, so that Paris may be in permanent contact with activity
everywhere in the world, and conscious of this contact, and that it may
become the capital-beyond ail "local" politics, whether sentimental
or economie-of a sort of inteilectual International. 57
To the belief in its literature and its political liberalisrn, Paris added
faith in its artistie internationalism. The incessantly proclaimed univer-
sality that, by a sort of mutual contamination of causes and effects, made
Paris the intellectual capital of the world produced two types of conse-
quences: the one irnaginary, which helped construct and consolidate a
Parisian mythology; the other real, associated with the infiow of foreign
artists, political refugees, and isolated artists who carne to get their start
in Paris-without its being possible to say which ones were the conse-
quences of the others. The two phenomena increased and multiplie d,
each one helping to establish and support the other. Paris was thus dou-
bly universal, by virtue both of the belief in its universality and of the
real effects that this belief produced.
Faith in the power and the uniqueness of Paris produced a rnassive
stream of immigration, and the image of the city as a condensed version
of the world (which today appears as the most pompous aspect of this
rhetorical tradition) also attests to its genuine cosmopolitanism. The
presence of a great rnany foreign communities-Poles, ltalians, Czechs
and Slovaks, Sianlese, Germans, Arrnenians, Africans, Latin Americans,
]apanese, Russians, and Americans who had settled in the French capital
between 1830 and 1945-as weIl as political refugees of every stripe and
artists who had come from aIl over the world to mix with the powerful
French avant-garde-evidence of the improbable synthesis of political
asylum and artistic consecration that occurred during this period-
nlade Paris a new "Babel," a "Cosmopolis," a crossroads of the artistic
world. 58
The personal freedom associated with Paris as an artistic capital found
expression in "bohemian" lifestyles. lndeed, tolerance of artists' uncon-
ventional behavior is one of the most frequently rernarked characteris-
tics ofParisian life. Arthur Koestler, who fied Nazi Germany and arrived
in Zurich in 1935 via Paris, later compared the two cities in his autobi-
ography:
we found it more difficult to be po or in Zurich than in Paris. Al-

though the largest town in Switzerland, Zurich has an intensely pro-
30 1 THE WORlD REPUBlIC OF LETTERS

vincial atmosphere, saturated with prosperity and virtue. To be poor
on Montparnasse could be regarded as a joke, a bohemian eccentric-
ity; but Zurich had neither a Montparnasse nor cheap bistros, nor that
kind of humour. In this clean, smug, orderly town, poverty was simply
degrading; and, though no longer starving, we were very poor in-
deed. 59
The contrast with life in Zurich ilhuninates one of the French capital's
great attractions for artists the world over: owing to its unique concen-
tration of a specifie sort of capital, and an exceptional conjunction of
political, sexual, and aesthetic freedoms, Paris offered the possibility of
living what is rightly called la vie d'artiste, which is to say elegant and
elective poverty.
Almost from the beginning foreigners came to Paris to denund and
proclaim political independence for their homelands while at the same
time inaugurating nationalliteratures and arts. Paris became the political
capital of the Poles after the "great irmnigration" of I830, and that of
Czech nationalists in exile after I9 I 5. Organs of the émigré press call-
ing for national independence in their various homelands proliferated,
among them El Americano (founded in I872), which championed na-
tionalist causes in Latin America, La Estrella dei Chile, and La Repûblica
Cubana (I896), organ of the Cuban republican government established
in Paris. 60 The Czech colony launched the national newspaper Na Zdar
in I9I4, followed the next year by La Nation Tchèque, a politicaljournal
of the nationalist resistance, and then in 1916 by L'Indépendance Tchèque,
founded in Switzerland and shortly thereafter relocated to Paris, where
it became the official organ of Czech exiles. 61 Paradoxically, as the
American art critic Harold Rosenberg pointed out in the I950S, because
"Paris was the opposite of the national in art, the art of every nation in-
creased through Paris." Thus Rosenberg sumrned up, sornewhat in the
manner of Gertrude Stein, what America owed to Paris: "In Paris,
American speech found its measure of poetry and eloquence. Criticism
born there achieved an appreciation of American folk art and music; of
the motion-picture technique of Griffiths; of the designs of New Eng-
land interiors and of early Yankee machines; of the sand paintings of the
Navajo, the backyard landscapes of Chicago and the East Side."62 This
sort of national reappropriation, which reflected what rnight be called
the neutrality or denationalization of Paris, has also been elnphasized by
historians of Latin America, many of whose writers and intellectuals dis-
Principles of a World History of Literafure 1 31

covered their national identity in Paris and, rnore generally, in Europe.
The Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954), his friend Paulo
Prado wrote in 1924, "discovered with wonder his own country in a
studio above the Place Clichy-navel of the world,"63 while the Peru-
vian poet César Vallejo (1892-1938) exclainled, "1 set out for Europe
and 1 learned to know Peru."64
It was in Paris that Adam Mickiewicz (1798-I855) wrote Pan Tadeu5z
(1834), considered today to be the Polish national epic.Jkai (I825-I904),
one of the most widely read authors in his native Hungary until the
I960s, wrote in his mernoirs: "We were all Frenchmen! We did not read
anything but Lanlartine, Michelet, Louis Blanc, Sue, Victor Hugo, and
Béranger; and if an English or German poet could find favor with us,
then rit was] only Shelley or Heine, both denied by their own nations,
English or Gerrnan only in their language but French in their spirit."65
The American poetWilliarn Carlos Williarns styled Paris the "artistic
Mecca"; the Japanese poet Katil Nagai (1879-I959) prostrated himself
before Maupassant's tomb when he arrived there in I907. The Italian
"Futurist Manifesto," signed by Marinetti, was published in the 20 Feb-
ruary 1909 issue of Le Figaro before appearing in Italian in the Milanese
review Poesia. The Spanish composer Manuel de Falla, who spent tinle
in Paris between 1907 and 1914, wrote to a friend: "For everything that
has to do with my profession, nly homeland is Paris."66 Paris was also the
"Black Babel" for the first intellectuals from Africa and the West Indies
who arrived in the French capital in the 1920S.67
Faith in the universality of Paris was so great that, in certain parts of
the world, writers began to write in French: the Brazilian Joaquim
Nabuco (1849-1910), who wrote a play in alexandrines, VOption (The
Choice, 1910), about an Alsatian's moral qualms after the Franco-Prus-
sian war; also the Peruvian short-story writer Ventura Garcia Calderôn
(I886-I959), the Brazilian poet of the abolition of slavery, Antônio de
Castro Alves (1847-I87I), the Peruvian Surrealist poet César Moro
(1903-I956), and the Ecuadoran poet Alfredo Gangotena (I904-1944),
a friend of Michaux, who lived in Paris for many years. Another Brazil-
ian, the novelist Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908), de-
scribed the French as the "rnost democratic people in the world" and
made Lamartine and Alexandre Dumas known in his native land.
The fascination with Paris in Latin America reached its apogee at the
end of the nineteenth century: "From my earliest childhood 1 dreamed
so much of Paris," Dario recalled, "that when 1 prayed, 1 asked God not

to let lue die without seeing Paris. For me Paris was a kind of heaven
where one could breathe the essence ofhappiness on earth."68 The same
nostalgia was evoked by the ]apanese poet Sakutaro Hagiwaro (1886-
1942), a product of this extraordinary international faith in Paris:
Ahl 1 would like to go to France

But France is too far
With a new jacket at least
Let us set off and wander as we please
When the train passes through the rllountains
Pressed against the window, blue sky
Alone 1 shall think of happy things
The dawn of a rnorning in May
Obeying the heart's whin1s, blades of grass sprouting. 69
It was out of adrniration for Frédéric Mistral that the Chilean poet
Lucila Godoy Alcayaga (1889-1957) chose to cail herself Gabriela Mis-
tral. In 1945 she became the first Latin American writer to receive the
Nobel Prize for Literature, in recognition of a body of work whose
models were wholly European and in which she sang even of villages on
the Rhône, softened by water and cicadas.7° ln 1871 Walt Whitman
cornposed a hymn to France, vanquished the previous year in the war
against Prussia, that appeared in Leaves of Grass under the tide "0 Star
of France" and that contains all the mythic images of Paris, symbol of
liberty:
Dim smitten star

Orb not of France alone, pale symbol of my soul, its
dearest hopes,
The struggle and the daring, rage divine for liberty,
Of aspirations toward the far idea, enthusiast's dreams of
brotherhood,
Of terror to the tyrant and the priest.
Star crucified-by traitors sold,
Star panting 0' er a land of death, heroic land,
Strange, passionate, rnocking, frivolous land.7 1
My reason for noting so many expressions of admiration for Paris has

nothing to do with ethnocentrisrn, much less sorne fonn of nationalist
pride; to the contrary, 1 was obliged to acknowledge their force-rnuch
Pril1ciples C!la Wortd History ofLiterature 1 33

to rrly surprise, and against my will in fact-in trying to account for the
effects of the prestige attaching to Paris. Moreover, it is clear that the
dorninant position enJoyed by Paris has often entailed a peculiar blind-
ness, particularly with regard to writings from those countries that are
most distant frorrl it. The ignorance-or, more accurately perhaps, the
rejection-of a historicized view of literature, the insistence on inter-
preting texts orùy in terrns of "pure" categories, which is to say catego-
ries purified of any historical or national reference, has often had cata-
strophic consequences for the interpretation and diffusion of foreign
works consecrated in Paris. The formalist bias of these authorities was
the result of huge misunderstandings that sornetimes infected critical
discourse, as in the cases of Beckett and Kafka, which we shall exarrune
later.
On the other hand, literary capital has regularly been put to political
and national uses in France. In their colonial ventures, but also in their
rel~tions with other nations, the French have practiced what Pierre
Bourdieu has called an "ünperialism of the universal."72 Their use of de-
nationalized capital for national purposes-in styling France, for exam-
pIe, the "mother of the arts"-has lent support to the least reputable
forms of nationalism, notably in connection with writers who most stri-
dently proclairned their loyalty to national tradition.
LlTERATURE, NATION, AND POUTles

The particular case of Paris, denationalized and universal capital of the
literary world, must not make us forget that literary capital is inherently
national. Through its essentiallink with language-itself always national,
since invariably appropriated by national authorities as -a symbol of
identity-literary heritage is a matter of foremost national interestJ3
Because language is at once an affair of state and the material out of
which literature is made, literary resources are inevitably concentrated,
at least initially, within the boundaries of the nation itself. Thus it is that
language and literature jointly provide political foundations for a nation
and, in the process, ennoble each other.
The National Foundations of Literature

The link between the state and literature depends on the fact that,
through language, the one serves to establish and reinforce the other.
Historians have demonstrated a direct connection between the emer-

gence of the first European states and the formation of" common lan-
guages" (which then later becarne "national languages").7 4 Benedict
Anderson, for example, sees the expansion of vernaculars, which sup-
plied administrative, diplomatie, and intellectual support for the emerg-
ing European states of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, as
the central phenornenon underlying the appearance of these statesJ5
From the existence of an organic bond, or interdependence, between
the appearance of national states, the expansion of vernaculars into
corrllnon languages, and the corresponding developrnent of new litera-
tures written in these vernaculars, it follows that the accumulation oflit-
erary resources is necessarily rooted in the political history of states.
More precisely, both the forrrlation of states and the errlergence oflit-
eratures in new languages derive from a single principle of differentia-
tion. For it was in distinguishing thernselves from each other, which is to
say in asserting their differences through successive rivalries and strug-
gles, that states in Europe gradually took shape from the sixteenth cen-
tury onward, thereby giving rise to the international political field in its
earliest fOl-rn. In this errlbryonic systenl, which may be described as a
systenl of differences (in the sarne sense in which phoneticists speak of
language as a systern of differences), language evidently played a central
role as a "marker" of difference. But it also represented what was at stake
in the contests that took place at the intersection of this nascent political
space and the literary space that was corrung into existence at the same
tinle,76 with the paradoxical result that the birth ofliterature grew out of
the early political history of nation-states.
The specifically literary defense of vernaculars by the great figures of
the world of letters during the Renaissance, which very quickly as-
surned the forrn of a rivalry arrlOng these "new" languages (new in the
literary rrlarket), was to be advanced equally by literary and political
Ineans.7 7 In this sense the various intellectual rivalries that grew up dur-
ing the Renaissance in Europe may be said to have been founded and
legitirruzed through political struggles. Sirrularly, with the spread of na-
tionalist ideas in the nineteenth century and the creation of new nations,
political authority served as a foundation for emerging literary spaces.
Owing to the structural dependence of these new spaces, the construc-
tion of world literary space proceeded once Inore through national ri-
valries that were inseparably literary and political.
Fronl the earliest stages of the unification of this space, national liter-
Pril1dples of a Wartd History of Literature 1 35

ary wealth, far from being the private possession of nations whose natu-
raI "genius" it was supposed to express, becarne the weapon and the
prize that both perrnitted and encouraged new claimants to enter inter-
national literary cornpetition. In order to compete rnore effectively,
countries in the center sought to define literature in relation to "na-
tional character" in ways that in large measure were thernselves the result
of structural opposition and differentiation. Their donrinant traits can
quite often be understood-as in the cases of Germany and England,
rising powers seeking to challenge French hegemony-in deliberate
contrast with the recognized characteristics of the predonrinant nation.
Literatures are therefore not a pure emanation of national identity; they
are constructed through literary rivalries, which are always denied, and
struggles, which are always international.
Given, then, that literary capital is national, and that there exists a rela-
tion of dependence with regard first to the state, then to the nation, it
becomes possible to connect the ide a of an economy peculiar to the lit-
erary world with the notion of a literary geopolitics. No national entity
exists in and of itself. In a sense, nothing is more international than a na-
tional state: it is constructed solely in relation to other states, and often in
opposition to them. In other words, no state-neither the ones that
Charles Tilly calls "segrnented" (or embryonic) nor, after 1750, "consol-
idated" (or national) states, which is to say the state in its modern
sense-can be described as a separate and autonomous entity, the source
of its own existence and coherenceJ8 To the contrary, each state is con-
stituted by its relations with other states, by its rivalry and competition
with them.Just as the state is a relational entity, so the nation is inter-na-
tional.
The construction (and reconstruction) of national identity and the
political definition of the nation that developed later, notably during
the course of the nineteenth century, were not the product of isolated
experience, of private events unfolding behind the ramparts of an in-
comparable and inCOIlllTlensurate history.What nationalist mytholo-
gies attempt to reconstitute (after the fact, in the case of the oldest
nations) as autarkic singularities arise in reality only from contact be-
tween neighboring peoples. Thus Michael Jeismann has been able to
demonstrate that Franco-German antagonism-a veritable "dialogue
des ennenris"-pernritted nationalism to flourish in each country in re-

action against a perceived "natural" enemy.79 Similarly, Linda Colley has
shown that the English nation was constructed through and through in
opposition to France. 80
The analysis of the ernergence of nationalism needs to go beyond the
assumption of a binary and belligerent relation between nations to take
into account a much rnore complex space of rivalries that proceed both
for and through a variety of fonns of capital, which may be literary, po-
litical, or economic. The totality of world political space is the product
of a vast range of national competition, where the clash between two
historical enernies-such as the one described by Danilo Kis between
Serbs and Croats-represents only the simplest and most archaic form. 81
Depoliticization
Little by little, however, literature succeeded in freeing itself from the
hold of the political and national authorities that originally it helped to
establish and legitirnize. The accumulation of specifically literary re-
sources, which involved the invention and development of a set of aes-
thetic possibilities, of fonns, narrative techniques, and fonnal solutions
(what the Russian formalists were to calI "procedures")-in short, the
creation of a specific history (more or less distinct from national history,
from which it could no longer be deduced)-allowed literary space
gradually to achieve independence and deterrnine its own laws of oper-
ation. Freed from its former condition of political dependency, literature
found itself at last in a position to assert its own autonomy.
W riters, or at least some of thern, could thus refuse both collectively
and individually to subrnit to the national and political definition of lit-
erature. The paradigm of this refusaI is undoubtedly Zola's "J'accuse."82
At the same tinle, internationalliterary competition, now also detached
fronl strictly national and political rivalries, acquired a life of its own.
The spread of freedom throughout world literary space occurred
through the autonornization of its constituent spaces, with the result
that literary struggles, freed from political constraints, were now bound
to obey no other law than the law ofliterature.
Thus, to take an exarnple that is apparently most unfavorable to the
argument l am rnaking, the Gennan literary renaissance at the end of
the eighteenth century was associated in part with national issues, being
the literary counterpart to the founding of the German nation as a po-
litical entity. The rise of the idea of a national literature in Gennany is
Prirzciples of a Vf;Orld History of Literature 1 37

explained first by political antagonisrn with France, then the culturally
dorninant power in Europe. Isaiah Berlin in particular has argued that
German nationalism had its roots in a sense of humiliation:
The French dominated the western world, politically, culturally, mili-
tarily. The humiliated and defeated Germans ... responded, like the
bent twig of the poet Schiller's theor'y, by lashing back and refusing to
accept their alleged inferiority. They discovered in themselves quali-
ties far superior to those of their tormentors. They contrasted their
own deep, inner life of the spirit, their own profound humility, their
selfless pursuit of true values-simple, noble, sublime-with the rich,
worldly, successful, superficial, smooth, heartless, morally empty
French. This mood rose to fever pitch during the national resistance
to Napoleon, and was indeed the original exemplar of the reaction of
many a backward, exploited, or at any rate patronized society, which,
resentful of the apparent inferiority of its status, reacted by turning to
real or imaginary triumphs and glories in its past, or enviable attributes
of its own national or cultural character. 83
The prodigious developrnent of German literary culture, beginning in

the second half of the eighteenth century, was therefore initially con-
nected with matters of imrnediate political import: to insist on cultural
grandeur was also a way of affirming the unity of the Gerrnan people
beyond the fact of its political disunion. But the argurnents that were
employed, the principles that were at issue in the debates of the period
and the very farm that these debates assurned, the stature of the greatest
German poets and intellectuals, their poetical and philosophical works,
which were to have revolutionary consequences for aIl of Europe, and
for French literature in particular-all these things gradually gave Ger-
nlan romanticism an exceptional degree of independence and a power
aIl its own. In the German case, romanticism was, and at the same time
was not, national; or, rather, it was national to start with and then subse-
quently detached itself from national authority. As a consequence, the
challenge to French dominance in literature in the nineteenth century
needs to be analyzed on the basis of the literary, rather th an the political,
history of the two countries.
Sirnilarly, notwithstanding differences of time and place, Latin Ameri-
can writers rnanaged in the twentieth century to achieve an interna-
tional existence and reputation that conferred on their nationalliterary
spaces (and, more generally, the Latin American space as a whole)

a standing and an inHuence in the larger literary world that were in-
COIT1l11ensurate with those of their native countries in the international
world of politics. Here, as in the Gerrnan case, literature enjoys a relative
autonon1y when the accurnulation of a literary heritage-which is to
say the international recognition that attaches to writers who are desig-
nated by critics in the center as "great" writers-enabled national liter-
ary cultures to escape the ho Id of national politics. As Valery Larbaud
pointed out, the literary and inteilectual rnap cannot be superirnposed
upon the politicaltnap, since neither literary history nor literary geogra-
phy can be reduced to political history. Nonetheless, literature rernains
relatively dependent on politics, above ail in countries that are relatively
unendowed with literary resources.
World literary space has therefore developed and achieved unity in
accordance with a parailel rnoven1ent that, as we shail see, is ordered in
relation to two antagonistic poles. On the one hand, there is a progres-
sive enlargement of literary space that accornpanies the spread of na-
tional independence in the various parts of the world. And, on the other,
there is a tendency toward autonomy, which is to say literary ernancipa-
tion in the face of political (and national) clairns to authority.
The original dependence of literature on the nation is at the heart of

the inequality that structures the literary world. Rivalry among nations
arises from the fact that their political, econonuc, rrtilita ry, diplomatie,
and geographical histories are not only different but also unequal. Liter-
ary resources, which are always stamped with the seal of the nation, are
therefore une quaI as weil, and unequaily distributed among nations. Be-
cause the effects of this structure weigh on ail nationalliteratures and on
ail writers, the practices and traditions, the fonns and aesthetics that have
currency in a given national literary space can be properly understood
only if they are related to the precise position of this space in the world
systen1. lt is the hierarchy of the literary world, then, that gives literature
its very fonTl. This curious edifice, which joins together writers from
different spaces whose n1utual rivalry is very often the only thing they
have in con1mon-a rivalry whose existence, as 1 say, is always denied-
was constructed over tin1e by a succession of national conHicts and chal-
lenges to fonnal and critical authority. Unification of the literary world
therefore depends on the entry of new contestants intent upon adding
to their stock of literary capital, which is both the instrurnent and
Principles oIa World History of Literature 1 39

the prize of their cornpetition: each new player, in bringing to bear
the weight ofhis national heritage-the orùy weapon considered legiti-
rnate in this type of struggle-helps to unify internationalliterary space,
which is to say to extend the domain of literary rivalry. ln order to take
part in the competition in the first place, it is necessary to believe in the
value of what is at stake, to know and to recognize it. It is this belief that
creates literary space and ailows it to operate, despite (and also by virtue
of) the hierarchies on which it tacitly rests.
The internationalization that 1 propose to describe here therefore
signifies rnore or less the opposite of what is ordinarily understood by
the neutralizing term "globalization," which suggests that the world po-
litical and economic system can be conceived as the generalization of a
single and universally applicable model. ln the literary world, by con-
trast, it is the competition among its members that defines and unifies
the system while at the sarne tirne rnarking its lirnits. Not every writer
pro_ceeds in the same way, but all writers attenlpt to enter the same race,
and ail of thern struggle, albeit with unequal advantages, to attain the
same goal: literary legitimacy.
It is not surprising, then, that Goethe elaborated the notion of
Weltliteratur precisely at the monlent of Germany's entry into the inter-
nationalliterary space. As a rnenlber of a nation that was a newcomer to
the game, chailenging French literary and intellectual hegemony, Goe-
the had a vital interest in understanding the reality of the situation in
which his nation now found itself. Displaying the perceptiveness com-
moruy found among newcorners from dominated cOlnmunities, not
oruy did he grasp the international character ofliterature, which is to say
its deployment outside national limits; he also understood at once its
cornpetitive nature and the paradoxical unity that results from it.
A New Method of Interpretation

These resources-at once concrete and abstract, national and interna-
tional, collective and subjective, political, linguistic, and literary-make
up the specific heritage that is shared by ail the writers of the world.
Each writer enters into international competition armed (or unarnled)
with his entire literary "past": by virtue solely of his rnembership in a
linguistic area and a national grouping, he embodies and reactivates a
whole literary history, carrying this "literary time" with him without
even being fully concious of it. He is therefore heir to the entire national

and international history that has "rnade" hiIn what he is. The cardinal
irnportance of this heritage, which amounts to a kind of "destiny" or
"fate," explains why even the most international authors, su ch as the
Spaniard Juan Benet or the Serb Danilo Ris, conceive of themselves, if
only by way of reaction against it, in terIT1S of the national space from
which they have come. And the same thing must be said of Samuel
Beckett, despite the fact that few writers seem further rernoved from the
reach ofhistory, for the course ofhis career, which led him from Dublin
to Paris, can be understood only in terms of the history of Irish literary
space.
None of this amounts to invoking the "influence" of national culture
on the development of a literary work, or to reviving national literary
history in its traditional forITl. Quite the contrary: understanding the
way in which writers invent their own freedom-which is to say per-
petuate, or alter, or reject, or add to, or deny, or forget, or betray their na-
tional literary (and linguistic) heritage-ITlakes it possible to chart the
course of their work and discover its very purpose. Nationalliterary and
linguistic patriInony supplies a sort of a priori definition of the writer,
one that he will transforrn (if need be, by rejecting it or, as in the case of
Beckett, by conceiving himself in opposition to it) throughout his ca-
reer. ln other words, the writer stands in a particular relation to world
literary space by virtue of the place occupied in it by the national space
into which he has been born. But his position also depends on the way
in which he deals with this unavoidable inheritance; on the aesthetic,
linguistic, and fonnal choie es he is led to make, which determine his po-
sition in this larger space. He may reject his national heritage, forsaking
his horneland for a country that is more richly endowed in literary re-
sources than his own, as Beckett and Michaux did; he may acknowledge
his patrimony while trying at the same time to transform it and, in this
way, to give it greater autonomy, like Joyce (who, though he left his na-
tive land and rejected its literary practices and aesthetic norms, sought to
found an lrish literature freed from nationalist constraints); or he may af-
firm the difference and irnportance of a nationalliterature, like Kafka, as
we shall see, but also like Yeats and Kateb Yacine. Ail these examples
show that, in trying to characterize a writer's work, one must situate it
with respect to two things: the place occupied by his native literary
space within world literature and his own position within this space.
Determining the position of a writer in this way has nothing to do
Principles of a VVorld History if Literature 1 41

with the usual sort of national contextualization tavored by literary crit-
ics. On the one hand, national (and linguistic) origin is now related to
the hierarchical structure of world literature as a whole; and, on the
other hand, it is recognized that no two writers inherit their literary past
in exactly the same fashion. Most critics, however, are led by a belief in
the singularity and originality of individu al writers to privilege sorrle as-
pect of their biography that hides this structural relation. Thus, for ex-
ample, the feminist critic who studies the case of Gertrude Stein con-
centrates on one of its aspects-the fact that she was a wonlan and a
lesbian-while forgetting, as though it were sornething obvious not
needing to be examined, that she was American. 84 Yet the United States
in the 1920S was literarily a dorninated country that looked to Paris in
order to try to accurrmlate resources it lacked. Any analysis that fails to
take into account the world literary structure of the period and of the
place occupied in this structure by Paris and the United States, respec-
tively, will be incapable of eXplaining Stein's perrrlanent concern to de-
velop a rnodern American nationalliterature (through the creation of an
avant-garde) and her interest in both American history and the literary
representation of the Arnerican people (of which her gigantic enterprise
The Making of American5 is no doubt the rnost outstanding pro o±). 85 The
fact that she was a woman in the corrununity of American intellectuals
in exile in Paris is, of course, of crucial ünportance for understanding
her subversive impulses and the nature of her aesthetic anlbitions. But
the deeper structural relationship, obscured by critical tradition, renlains
paramount. Generally speaking, one can point to sorne feature of every
writer's career-important, to be sure, but nonetheless secondary-that
conceals the structural pattern ofliterary don1Ïnation.
The dual historicization proposed here makes it possible not only to
find a way out from the inevitable impasse of literary history, which
finds itself relegated to a subordinate role and accused of being power-
less to grasp the essence ofliterature; it also allows us to describe the hi-
erarchical structure of the literary world and the constraints that operate
within it. The inequality of the transactions that take place in this world
goes unperceived, or is otherwise denied or euphernistically referred to,
because the eCUlTlenical picture it presents of itself as a peaceful world,
untroubled by rivalry or struggle, strengthens received beliefs and assures
the continued existence of a quite different reality that is never adrrutted.
The sirnple idea that dorninates the literary world still today, ofliterature

as sornething pure and hannonious, works to eliminate aIl traces of the
invisible violence that reigns over it and denies the power relations that
are specific to this world and the batdes that are fought in it. According
to the standard view, the world ofletters is one of peaceful inter nation-
alism, a world of free and equal access in which literary recognition is
available to aIl writers, an enchanted world that exists outside time and
space and so escapes the rnundane conflicts of hurnan history. This
fiction, of a literature emancipated from aIl historical and political at-
tachments, was invented in the most autonornous countries of world lit-
erary space. It is in these countries, which for the most part have rnan-
aged to free thernselves from political constraints, that the belief in a
pure definition of literature is strongest, of literature as something en-
tirely cut off from history, frorn the world of nations, political and rnili-
tary competition, economic dependence, linguistic domination-the
idea of a univers al literature that is nonnational, nonpartisan, and un-
rnarked by political or linguistic divisions. It is perhaps not surprising,
then, that very few writers at the center of world literature have any idea
of its actual structure. Though they are familiar with the constraints and
norms of the center, they fail to recognize them as such since they have
come to regard them as natural. They are blind almost by definition:
their very point of view on the world hides it from them, for they be-
lieve that it coincides with the small part of it they know.
The irremediable and violent discontinuity between the metropoli-
tan literary world and its suburban outskirts is perceptible orùy to writ-
ers on the periphery, who, having to struggle in very tangible ways in
order sirnply to find "the gateway to the present" (as Octavio Paz put it),
and then to gain admission to its central precincts, are more clearsighted
than others about the nature and the fonn of the literary balance of
power. 86 Despite these obstacles, which are never acknowledged--so
great is the power of denial that accompanies the extraordinary belief in
literature--they nonetheless manage to invent their own freedOlTI as art-
ists. It is by no means a paradox, then, that authors living today on the
edges of the literary world, who long ago learned to confront the laws
and forces that sustain the unequal structure of this world and who are
keecly aware that they must be recognized in their respective centers in
order to have any chance of surviving as writers, should be the most
sensitive to the newest aesthetic inventions of international literature,
from the recent atternpts of Anglo-Saxon writers to devise a worldwide
Principles aIa World History C!fLiterature 1 43

cross-fertilization of styles to the latest narrative techniques of Latin
American novelists, arnong others. This lucidity, and the impulse to re-
bel against the existing literary order, are at the very heart of their iden-
tity as wrÏters.
For all these reasons, ever since French hegemony reached its height
at the end of the eighteenth century, radical challenges ta the existing
literary arder have appeared in the rnost in1poverished territories of
the international republic of letters, shaping and lastingly rnodifYing its
structure, which is to say the very forms of literature. Particularly with
Herder, the challenge to the French rnonopoly on literary legitirnacy
succeeded so well in establishing itself that an alternative pole was able
to be created. But it is nonetheless true that domÏnated rnen and wornen
ofletters have often been incapable of grasping the reasons for their spe-
ciallucidity. Even if they are clearsighted with regard to their particular
position and to the specifie forrns of dependency in which they are
caught up, their perception of the global structure of which they are a
part rernains incomplete.

2 1 The Invention of Literature
How the Romans Enriched Their Language ... Imitating the best Greek authors, transforming
themselves into them, devouring them; and after having weil digested them, converting
them into blood and nourishment, taking for themselves, each according to his nature, and
the argument he wished to choose, the best author of whom they observed diligently ail the
most rare and exquisite virtues, and these like shoots, as 1have already said, they grafted and
applied to their own tongue.
--Joachim du Bellay, The Defense and Illustration of the French Language
We imitate [in Brazil], there is no doubt. But we are not confined to imitation ... We have
something quite different to do ... We are putting an end to the domination of the French
spirit. We are putting an end to the grammatical domination of Portugal.
-Mario de Andrade, letter to Alberto de Oliveira
lITERATURE IS OBVIOUSLY and directly connected, albeit in very com-

plex ways, to language. The writer's relationship to his literary language
(which is not always either his mother tongue or his national language)
is infinitely singular and personal. But the whole problem of grasping
the relationship between language and literature has to do with the very
ambiguity of the status of language. It is clearly used for political pur-
poses,l yet at the same tirne it supplies the raw material with which
writers work. Literature is invented through a gradual separation from
political obligations: forced at first to place their art in the service of the
national purposes of the state, writers little by little achieved artistic
freedom through the invention of specifically literary languages. The
uniqueness and originality of individu al writers becan1e apparent, in-
deed possible, only as the result of a very long process of gathering and
concentrating literary resources. This process of continuous and collec-
tive creation is nothing other than the history ofliterature itself.
Literary history rests therefore neither on national chronologies nor
on a series of neatly juxtaposed works, but on the succession of revolts
and emancipations thanks to which writers, despite their irreducible de-
pendence on language, have n1anaged to create the conditions of a pure
and autonomous literature, freed from considerations of political utility.
It is the history of the appearance, then of the accumulation, concen-
tration, distribution, and diversion of literary wealth, which tirst arose
in Europe and subsequently becal11e the object of belief and rivalry
throughout the world. The critical ITlOn1ent in the early accuITmlation
of literary capital-a fonnula very far rernoved frorn literary enchant-
ITIe!lt and derealization-was the publication by Joachin1 du Bellay
(1522---1560) of La ddfence et illustration de la langue ji"ançoyse (The Defense
and Illustration of the French Language, 1549).
1 am quite aware that it ITIay seem paradoxical, or arbitrary, or even
deliberately Gallocentric to adopt as a point of departure for a history of
world literature a literary event that is (or at least appears to be) so typi-
cally French. An earlier rnon1ent could easily enough be found: even
within the same tradition one might point to an older work su ch as La
concorde des deux langages (The Harn10ny of the Two Languages, 1513),
by Jean Lemaire de Belges; or, within another tradition, the Italian for
exan1ple, Dante's De vulgari eloquentia (On Vernacular Eloquence, 1303-
04), which James Joyce and Sarnuel Beckett cited in 1929 with an alto-
gether sinular view to appropriating its faITle and legitinucy on behalf of
Joyce's own pioneering enterprise, Finnegans J;J;ake. 2 But du Bellay's
work marked the tirst tÎlne that a nationalliterature had been founded
in complex relation to another nation and, through it, another language,
one that ITlOreOVer was dorninant and apparently indonutable, naITlely
Latin-a paradigmatic initiative having both national and international
implications that was to supply the n10del, reproduced over and over
again in the course of a long history that will be traced here in its broad
outlines, of a world republic of letters. SÎl11ilarly, the clairn that Paris is
the capital ofliterature is not an effect of Gallocentrisrn but the result of
a careful historical analysis showing that the exceptional concentration

of literary resources that occurred in Paris over the course of several
centuries gradually led to its recognition as the center of the literary
world.
This history has until now remained so invisible that it needs to be
conlpletely reconstructed, which means having to go back to works that
have been cornrnented upon a hundred tirnes according to the ordinary
habits of literary criticism, as those of du Bellay, Malherbe, Rivarol, and
Herder have been-which is to say with reference solely to the works
themselves, and never on the basis of the hidden, structural relations that
ob tain among all of them. A few historians, notably Marc Fumaroli, have
examined the initial stages in the development of these relations during
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe; but this process has
continued until the present day with the emergence, on a worldwide
scale, of still rnore new literatures, new literary nations, new interna-
tional writers, all of them the product of a rupture whose paradigm is
filrnished by du Bellay's Difense and Illustration.
Confronted with a phenomenon that is so poorly known and so gen-
erally misunderstood, the historian needs to treat it in broad perspective,
keeping in mind the difficulties and the risks inherent in description
concerned with the long terru (in Braudel's sense) while at the same
tirne being alert to events and mechanisms ordinarily masked by the
falsely obvious and misleadingly familiar picture due to academic liter-
ary criticism. Moreover, it will be possible to reconstruct such a history
only if one is prepared to go beyond not only the political and linguistic
borders within which literary histories are invariably confined-and
which su ch histories fail even to take into account, especially in the case
of the great literary traditions, such as the French-but also the bound-
aries between disciplines, which are no less difficult to get clear of.
Three major stages may be distinguished in the genesis of world literary

space. The first involves its initial formation, which may be dated to the
appearance of the French Pléiade and of du Bellay's manifesto in the
mid-·sixteenth century. This was the age of what Benedict Anderson
calls the "revolutionary vernacularizing thrust of capitalism"3-a revo-
lution that gained momenturn during the fifteenth and sixteenth centu-
ries and that saw the exclusive use of Latin among educated men give
way first to a dernand for intellectual recognition of vulgar tongues, then
to the creation of modern literatures claiming to cornpete with the
The Invention qfLiterature 1 47

grandeur of ancient literatures. The second rnajor stage in the enlarge-
lnent of the literary world corresponds to the "philological-lexigraphic
revolution" described by Anderson, 4 which began in the late eighteenth
century and unfolded throughout the nineteenth century. This revolu-
tion saw the appearance in Europe of new nationalist movements associ-
ated with the invention or reinvention (to use Eric Hobsbawnl's terITls)
of self-consciously national languages and, subsequently, the creation of
"popular" literatures, surnmoned to serve the national idea and to give it
the symbolic foundation that it lacked. 5 Finaily, the process of decoloni-
zation represents the third ITlajor stage in the enlargernent of the literate
world, ITlarking the entry into international competition of contestants
who until then had been prevented from taking part.
HDW TD "DEVDUR" LATIN

At the moment when The Difense and Illustration appeared, the debate
ove~ the status of the French language occupied center stage in the
world of letters. The whole question of vernaculars (which was to be
posed and discussed in ail of Europe) is bound up with that of Latin.
During this period, as Fumaroli puts it, there was "a dizzying difference
of sYlnbolic altitude" between the vulgar tongues and the Latin lan-·
guage. Latin-together with Greek, reintroduced by hunlanist schol-
ars--had accuITmlated ail of the literary and, more generaily, cultural
capital then in existence; but it was also a language on which Rome and
the entire religious establishment had a ITlOnopoly, the pope being in-
vested with a dual authority that by itself surnrnarized the exhaustive
domination to which the secular inteilectual world was subject, extend-
ing from sacerdotium-things of the faith-to include studiurn, which is
to say everything that touches on learning, study, and inteilectual mat-
ters. As the language of knowledge and faith, Latin exercised almost
complete control over existing inteilectual resources and thus ünposed
(to quote FUITlaroli once nl0re) a genuine "linguistic servitude."6
The humanist enterprise is therefore to be understood at least in part
as an atteITlpt by the laity, in its batde against Latinist clerics and the
scholastic tradition, to achieve inteilectual autonomy by reappropriating
a secularized Latin heritage. Thus the humanists made their purpose
plain in opposing to the "barbarie" Latin of the scholastics the re-
finernent of "Ciceronian" Latin. By reintroducing a corpus of original
Latin texts-anl0ng them treatises on grammar and rhetoric, notably

those of Cicero and Quintilian-as well as the practice of translation
and conlnlentary, they diverted the ancient heritage of the "classics" by
secularizing it-that is, by challenging the monopoly of the church. Eu-
ropean hurnanisrn thus represents an early instance of the enuncipation
of the literate world froITl the control and domination of the church.7
The dOITunant power in this ernerging intellectual space, as Fernand

Braudel rnanaged to establish after lengthy debate, was Italy. 8 Until then
only three "rnodern" poets had succeeded in establishing thernselves in
a vernacular, and they were all Tuscan: Dante Alighieri (1265-132 1),
Petrarch (1304-1374), and Boccacio (1313-1375). Still in the sixteenth
century they enjoyed iITlinenSe prestige throughout Europe. It was in
their horneland, then, that a cultural patrirnony was first able to be accu-
rnulated. In the second half of the fifteenth century, Braudel observed,
"Europe was ravaged in its center, France. Italy, by contrast, was pro-
tected: the succession of generations of humanists, who in the end
prevailed, favored progress and the accumulation of knowledge, frOITl
Petrarch via Salutati to Bruni." And precisely because "all hUITlanisITl is
twofold, national first, European next," internaI rivalries and quarrels de-
veloped in the worlds of scholarship and letters. 9 While sorne hunlanists
who advocated a return to Ciceronian Latin also lent their support to
what Dante called the "illustrious vernaculars," others resisted.
The batde over the status of vulgar tongues was in fact the logical
outcome of the enterprise ofhumanist secularization. But in the case of
the French humanists, this enterprise held out the doubly attractive
prospect of challenging the power and preeminence of Italy, in both
scholarship and poetry, by establishing a language capable of rivaling the
Tuscan dialect; and also of offering an alternative to submission to Latin,
whether Ciceronian or scholastic. The campaign for the legitimacy of
the French language was therefore conceived as a way of freeing the
worlds oflearning and literature from the influence of the church while
at the same tinle contesting the hegemony of the Italian hununists. 10
In northern Europe, the spread of the Reformation had likewise chal-

lenged the monopoly of Latin and the hitherto unquestioned suprern-
acy of the church. In this context the translation of the Bible into Ger-
rnan by Luther in 1534 plainly represented a rejection of the church's
clainl to authority, Il and filrnished the basis for a standard written lan-

guage that later became modern Gerrnan. Throughout Protestant Eu-
rope the sanle tendency gave impetus to the development of vernaculars
that, through the reading of the Bible, were to be rnassively disserninated
among the lower classes of society.12 Leaving to one side the special case
of Germany, which long rernained a disunified collection of states, in ail
the countries that adopted Lutheranisrn or other Protestant faiths (An-
glicanism, Calvinism, and Methodisrn) the rise of vernaculars was asso-
ciated with the growth of state structures. In northern Europe particu-
lady, in Finland, Norway, and Sweden, translations of the Bible made
possible the formation of politically unified nations.
Thus on either si de of the great divide created by the Reforrnation in
western Europe, the challenge to the total domination of the church and
of Latin was the driving force behind the campaign on behalf of vulgar
tongues. Following the denorninational clashes of the years 1520-1530,
however, the humanist movement gradually lost its religious character
and began to come apart under the strain produced by the increasingly
divergent interests of philologists and church reformers. From the 153 os
onward, the schism between the Protestant north and Catholic south
amounted in effect to a sort of division of labor. Although the church
exercised, as we have seen, a dual authority of sacerdotium and studium-
of faith and learning-the Reforrnation challenged the former, which is
to say ecclesiastical control over strictly religious practices and institu-
tions, while hmnanism contested the latter, which is to say ecclesiastical
control over scholarship, poetry, and rhetoric. The distinctive separation
of powers taking shape in France-unlike in England, where, as we shail
see, political decentralization prevented a challenge to the church's mo·-
nopoly upon studium from developing-was marked by the abandon-
ment (except in the case ofCalvinism, which remained a rninority faith)
of the demand for the reading and dissernination of the Bible in French
and for lay participation in deterrnining theological doctrine: even at the
height of the battle between the upholders of Latin and those who de-
fended the vulgar tongue, after 1530 there was no longer any question of
French replacing the Latin of the schoolmen or disputing the privileged
position of liturgical and theological Latin. Despite the structural de-
pendency of the kingdorn with respect to the church, the battle on be-
half of the "king's language" therefore set in motion a unique process of
secularization.

Within humanism itsel( rivalries assurned political form. To offset the
influence of Rome and of ltalian men of letters, the Pléiade advocated
the use of the French language, which was also the language of the king.
ln opposing the hmnanist universalism that sustained the dOlnÏnation of
Latin, French rnen of letters ernbraced the cause of their king and the
advance of royal sovereignty and authority in the face of papal power.
But in order for the language of the king of France to be able to pretend
to the rank of "Latin of the rnoderns," for its defenders to be able to dare
openly to cornpare their vulgar language to that of the pope and the
clerics, it needed to assure its own superiority, both literarily and politi-
cally, over the langue d'oc in the southern part of the kingdom and the
other dialects of the langue d'oïl in the north. The language of the Île-
de-France was associated with the royal principle from a very early tirne;
indeed, Fumaroli argues that France was constructed around "a King-
Word." U ntil the sixteenth century it was through a royal institution-
"the Chancellery of France and its prestigious corps of royal notaries
and clerks, all of whom were layrnen"-that "an unbroken tradition"
was carried on by "high functionaries of the royal language and style."13
ln a sense, these functionaries constituted a corps of royal writers who,
by drafting legal docurnents and writing historical chronicles, worked to
prOlnote the political and diplomatic prestige of the royal language and
the "increase," as du Bellay remarked, of its stylistic, literary, and poetic
wealth. 14 ln the sixteenth century, then, the vulgar language began to ac-
quire an incontestable legitimacy as rnuch on the politicallevel-the fa-
mous Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts in 1539, which stipulated that legal
rulings be handed down in French rather than Latin, is evidence of
this-as on the literary level, for it was at this tiIne that gralnmars, lexi-
cons, and treatises on orthography appeared.
If the poets of the Pléiade sided with the royal court-their first vic-
tory was to be the selection of Dorat, leader of the new school, as pre-
ceptor of the children of King Henri II-this is because for thenl the
question was as much political as aesthetic. To take a position, as du
Bellay did in The Dqènse and Illustration, against the recognized poetical
genres practiced in the powerful feudal courts of the kingdorn of France
("leave aside all these French poesies to the floral garnes of Toulouse, and
the contest of Rouen, the rondels, ballades, virelays, chants royal, songs,
and other such spices which do corrupt the taste of our tongue, and
serve not, save to bear witness to our ignorance"), was to explicitly de-
The I11l1ention C!fLiterature 1 5l

clare oneself against feudal prerogatives in the political sphere while at
the same tirne, in the literary sphere, opposing the proponents of the
"second rhetoric," who were also partisans of the poetic usage of the
vulgar tongue, only conceived as a set of codified poetical forrrls. 15 Up
until this ti111,e the court of the king was distinguished from other feudal
courts solely by its status as primus inter pares. 16 But now the French
crown achieved decisive victories against its rivaIs, laying claim to the
hegemony that the feudal courts had previously exercised in the cul-
tural dOl'nain. Beginning in 1530, François 1 founded the Collège des
Lecteurs Royaux, ordered the construction oflibraries and the purchase
of paintings, and con1.manded the translation of ancient works after the
exaillple of the Italian humanist courts.
The new royal policy regarding language triggered an initial accumula-

tion of political, linguistic, and literary resources, on the strength of
which cornpetition between the language of the king of France, the
doubly sacred language of Rome, and the very literary Tuscan dialect
was able to be established and proclaimed. It should be added that this
program, though at the time it no doubt appeared to be overly ambi-
tious, if not actually unachievable, was also favored by the French doc-
trine of translatio imperii et studii) according to which France and its king
were predestined to exercise the supremacy that had lapsed with the fall
of Rome and that Charlenugne had reclaimed for himself seven centu-
ries earlier. 17
Du Bellay's treatise (translated in part frorn a dialogue by the Italian
author Sperone Speroni) was a frank declaration of war against the
donunation of Latin. To be sure, the debate over the question of vernac--
ulars, over the primacy of one or another aillong them and their com-
plex and conflictual relations with Latin, was not new. It had begun in
Tuscany in the twelfth century with Dante (whose declaration of lin-
guistic independence ultimately failed to create a nationalliterature, as
we shall see) and was la ter carried on in France, notably by Christophe
de Longueil and then by Jean Lemaire de Belges in The Harmony of the
TUlO Languages. But this treatise, far from inaugurating a competition be-
tween French, Latin, and Tuscan, linked the two vulgar sisters-French
and Tuscan, daughters and heirs ofLatin--in a "felicitous equality."18 Its
author refusing to choose between them, the quarrel between the two
languages ended in reconciliation. If therefore The Dejènse and Illustration

marked a break with the past, this is because it heralded a new era, not
one of linguistic concord and serenity, but of open battle and conlpeti-
tion with Latin.
Du Bellay's essay, regarded today by most scholars as a rnere parnphlet,
is usually thought ta be ofinterest only insofar as it illmuinates continui-
ties and discontinuities in the humanist tradition and provides an oppor-
tunity for spotting classical citations and detecting ltalian influences.
Moreover, since poetry is associated much rnore strongly th an other lit-
erary genres with national traditions, it has typically been regarded as ev-
idence of a special national purpose, with the result that no atternpt has
been made to relate the development of poetry to any larger trans-
national history. But The Drdènse and Illustration was in fact a revolution-
ary text, an assertion of strength, a progralu for the enrichment of the
French language; above aIl it was a manifesto for a new literature and a
luanual giving French poets the literary tools they needed to enter into
competition with Latin and its rnodern successor, Tuscan. It was not a
calI for a return ta the past, stilliess a pIe a for simple imitation of the an-
cients; it was a deliberate declaration of war. Du Bellay no longer sought,
as his predecessors had done, rnerely ta inherit the splendor of the clas-
sics, but actually to prevail over Greek and Latin, as weIl as Tuscan, in
open conlbat-a cOlubat that was not only linguistic, rhetorical, and po-
etic, but also political.
The Latin language, logically enough in view of its dominance, served
as the unique measure of literary excellence. In order to undern1Îne the
dual hegeluony of the ecclesiastical and Ciceronian Latin defended by
the Italians, du Bellay proposed a brilliant and unsuspected solution: a di-
version of capital that conserved the gains of Latinist hurnanism-a vast
collection ofknowledge derived from translations and COll11uentaries on
ancient texts-while diverting them to the profit of French, a language
that was, as he put it, less "rich." This could be do ne very süuply. First,
du Bellay strenuously rejected translation, which in his view only en-
couraged "slavish" imitation, endlessly reproducing Greek and Latin
texts without taking anything from them-that is, without contributing
to the enrichment of the language: "What think they then to do, these
replasterers of walls, who day and night break their heads with striving
to irnitate? Do 1 say to imitate? nay, to transcribe a Virgil and a Cicero,
building their poerns with hen1Îstiches of the one, and swearing fealty in
their proses to the words and thoughts of the other ... Think not then,
The Invention qfLiteratul'e 1 53

imitators, servile flock, to attain to the top point of their excellence." To
"enrich his language," du Bellay proposed "to borrow from a foreign
tongue thoughts and words and appropriate thern to our own . . .
Therefore 1 do admonish thee (0 thou who desirest the increasing of
thy language, and wouldst excell therein) not to imitate lightly (à pié levé
as sorneone lately said) the rnost famous authors therein, as ordinarily do
for the rnost part our French poets, a thing indeed as vicious as it is
profitless to our con1lllon speech."19
To emphasize the irnportance he attached to appropriation, du Bellay
employed the rnetaphor of devouring, 20 comparing this process to what
the Rornans did: "Irnitating the best Greek authors, transforming them-
selves into them, devouring them; and after having well digested them,
converting them into blood and nourishment."21 Plainly this process of
conversion must be understood in its implicit, though long denied, eco-
nomic sense as well: French poets were being counseled to seize, devour,
and_ digest an ancient heritage in order to convert it into national liter-
ary "assets." The peculiar sort of irnitation du Bellay had in mind con-
sisted in carrying over the immense achievernent of Latin rhetoric into
French. Confident that the French language would one day succeed to
the dominant position of Latin and Greek, he offered his fellow "Poëtes
Françoys" a way of achieving superiority over their rivaIs in ltaly and
elsewhere. In rejecting the "vieilles poësies Françoyses," he condemned
as outmoded not only poetical norms that were current only within the
borders of the kingdom of France but also all those forms that, by their
failure to embrace humanist rnodernity (which is to say, paradoxically,
Latin poetry), had forfeited any clairn to take part in the new European
competition.
With The Dejènse and Illustration c:f the French Language) du Bellay
therefore laid the foundations of a unified internationalliterary space. In
retrospect he can be seen to have signaled the advent of what Fumaroli
calls "a grand European conlpetition, with the Ancients as coaches and
referees; the French were expected to win every match ... The enthusi-
asrn of the French would ensure their victory over their ltalian and
Spanish rivaIs. The participation of the English was not yet envisaged."22
Du Bellay--and with hinl the whole Pléiade school--sought to "en-
rich" the French language by means of a diversion of assets. Within a
century and a half France had succeeded in reversing the balance of
power in its favor, so that by the time of Louis XIV it reigned as the
dorrùnant literary power in Europe.

To this initial Tuscan-French core were gradually added Spain, and
then England, which together fonned the first group of major literary
powers, each endowed with a "great language" as well as a sizable liter-
ary patrirnony. The highpoint of the Golden Age had passed by the
rnid-seventeenth century, however, by which point Spain entered upon
a period of slow de cline that was inseparably literary and political. This
"vast collapse, this very slow sinking" created a growing gap between
Spanish literary space and that of the French and the English, now
poised to assurne their place as the leading literary powers in Europe. 23
Italy: An Argument from Contraries

The case of Italy furnishes an argument frOlTl contraries in favor of the
proposition that there is a necessary link between the founding of astate
and the formation, first of a com.mon language, and then of a literature.
Historically, where a centralized state fails to ernerge, neither the at-
ternpt to legitinlÎze a vulgar tongue nor the hope of creating a national
literature is able to succeed. In the fourteenth century, in Tuscany, Dante
had sought to free the regional vernacular from the domination of Latin.
Indeed, he was the first to have used his native dialect, in Il Convivio
(The Banquet, 1304-13°7), in order to reach a larger public. And in the
treatise On Vernacular Eloquence) composed in Latin and begun at the
same time, he had propounded the idea of an "illustrious vulgar tongue,"
a poetic, literary, and scientific language that would be founded on the
basis of several Tuscan dialects. The influence of this treatise was to be
decisive in France (for the poets of the Pléiade) and in Spain in marshal-
ing support for the vernacular language as the vehicle of literary, and
consequently national, expression.
The novelty and importance ofDante's agurnent led it to be adopted
nmch later by writers who found thernselves in a structurally sinlilar po-
sition. Thus James Joyce and Sarrmel Beckett in the la te 1920S pointed to
it as model and precursor at a lnoment when the influence ofEnglish-
the result of colonial donlÎnation in Ireland-bore comparison with
that of Latin in Dante's tinle. Beckett, anxious to defend Joyce's literary
and linguistic purposes in Finnegans VVt1ke) explicitly clainled the Tuscan
poet as a noble predecessor in setting out to oppose the rnonopoly en-
joyed by English in their homeland.
In Italy, and Inore particularly in Tuscany, literary production in the
vernacular was both earlier and nlOre prestigious than elsewhere: conse-
crated as classics during their own lifetimes, the three great Tuscan po-

ets-Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio-presided over the accurnulation
of the greatest literary wealdl of the time, not only in Italy but also in
the whole of Europe. Accordingly, their work was invested with the dual
prestige of priority and perfection. But in the absence of forces tending
to produce a unified Italian kingdorn, and also because of the influence
of the church, which was greater in Italy than elsewhere, this enornlOUS
initial stock of literary capital failed to produce a unified literary do-
rnain. The Italian courts rernained divided, with the result that none was
powerful enough to adopt and fully authorize the use of the "illustrious
vulgar tongue" advocated by Dante, or indeed of any other: Latin re-
Inained the COlnnlon and dominant language. As Funlaroli observes,
Petrarch, "like his disciple Boccaccio and his sixteenth-century heir
Bembo ... was torn between Latin literature, which enjoyed supremacy
in Italy and throughout Christian Europe thanks to Roman sacerdotal
authority, and Italian literature, which lacked the support of an uncon-
test~d central political authority."24
The central debate in Italy during the sixteenth century opposed the
supporters of the vernacular tongue to the Latinists. In the end it was the
argmnents of Pietro Belnbo (1470-1547), whose Prose della volgar Zingua
(Essays on the Vernacular Language, 1525) advocated a return to the
Tuscan literary and linguistic tradition of the fourteenth century, that
carried the day. Benlbo's "archaic" sensibility, nlarked by a thorough-
going purism, halted the creation of a fund of literary capital, arresting
poetical creativity and the renewal of an ancient tradition by restoring
the sterilizing rule of inutation (on the model of the Latin humanists).
The exalnple ofPetrarch, now established both as a stylistic model and a
gralnnlatical nonn, helped slow the pace of innovation in ltalian letters.
For a very long tüne the poets were confined to imitation of Dante,
Petrarque, and Bocaccio: in the absence of any centralized state structure
that nùght have helped to stabilize and "granunatize" common lan-
guages,25 it fell to poetry, whose fundamental role as the incarnation of
perfection had now assumed mythical proportions, to act as guardian of
the order of the language and as the measure of all things literary.
Broadly speaking, it is true to say that poetical, rhetorical, and aesthetic
problenls were subordinated in Italy to the debate over linguistic norms
until the achievement of political unity in the nineteenth century. Ow-
ing to the inability to exploit the political power of an organized state,
and so accmnulate a specifically literary wealth through the creation of a

stable cormTIon language having a standard grarnmar and lexicon, an au-
tonomous literary space was very late in being forrned in Italy. Its liter-
ary heritage was able to be reappropriated as a national asset-symbol-
ized by the elevation of Dante to the status ofnational poet-only after
the establishrnent of a unified kingdom in 186 1.
The sarne analysis, allowing for differences in historical context and
developrnent, rnay be applied to Gerrnany. Here again, despite the early
and significant accurnulation of resources, the political division of the
country prevented it fi'om gathering sufficient literary wealth to be able
to cornpete with other nations in Europe before the end of the eigh-
teenth century, when the first stirrings of national unity nude it possible
to reclaim the Gerrnan-Ianguage literary tradition as part of a national
heritage. As for Russia, it did not begin the pro cess of accumulating lit-
erary assets until the beginning of the nineteenth century.26
THE BATTlE OVER FRENCH

The Pléiade represented the first great revolution in French poetry. It
was to shape poetical theory and practice in France for at least three
hundred years, as much frorrl the point of view of privileged genres (the
rondeau, ballad, and other forms promoted by the second rhetoric grad-
ually disappeared, not truly to be encountered again until Mallarrrlé and
Apollinaire) as of the new metrics and prosody (verses of eight and of six
feet, and above all the "rrlètre-roi," the Alexandrine, which was to be-
come the standard nleter for the whole classical period) and stanza
patterns that came to be generalized and adopted throughout French
literary space-not omitting, of course, the obligatory references to an-
tiquity.27
N onetheless, this opening salvo in the war with Latin in no way sig-
naled the readiness of French to rival, either in fact or in belief, the im-
rrlense power-syrnbolic, religious, political, intellectual, literary, rhetor-
ical-of the older language. The history not only of French literature,
but also of French grammar and rhetoric during the second half of the
sixteenth century and the whole of the seventeenth, can be described as
the continuation of the same struggle for the same prize-a struggle
that was unacknowledged yet unmistakably real, carried on with the ob-
ject of obtaining for the French language equality and, ultinutely, supe-
riority in relation to Latin. What is traditionally called "classicislTI," the
highpoint of this cumulative process, is a shorthand for the set and suc-
The Invention c:fLiterature 1 57

cession of strategies that enabled France in only a little rnore than a cen-
tury to realize its ambition of competing with the rnost powerfül lan-
guage and culture in the world (thus du Bellay's inaugural gesture in
The Dqènse) , achieving an indubitable victory over Latin during the
"century of Louis XIV" The triurnph of French-now considered the
"Latin of the ITlOderns"-was unhesitatingly and universally recognized
throughout Europe.
What historical linguists cali the process of codifYing or standardiz-
ing a language,28 ITlarked by the appearance of grammars and treatises
on rhetoric, rules of proper usage, and so on, seerns in this case almost
to arnount to an immense collective undertaking aimed at increasing
French literary and linguistic wealth-so rnuch so that the extreme at-
tention shown to the question of bon usage throughout the kingdom of
France during the seventeenth century appears to be evidence of an at-
ternpt to rob Latin of its continental preeminence and thereby acquire
title to the farnous imperium that it had exercised for so long. N either of
these things is true, of course: there was neither a generalized will to
power nor an explicit policy of state transmitted from generation to
generation and devoted to obtaining political and cultural suprelnacy
for the kingdom of France. In France, as elsewhere, struggles between
the learned and the worldly (doctes and mondains), and between gram-
marians and writers, played thernselves out in ways that were at once
tacitly understood and publically denied. These formative rivalries gave
French literary space its distinctive character by determining what was
at stake and defining the specifie form that its literary resources were to
assume after the Pléiade-hence the importance, which was as nluch
political as literary, attached to the language debate. Looked at from the
narrow perspective of domestic literary and political experience, how-
ever, the historie al course of French letters resists all explanation. We
need to take a wider view and examine the international dÎlnension of
these rivalries, not only with other European languages but also with a
dead yet still enormously influential tongue, which for a very long time
were to remain the driving force of literary and linguistic innovation
and debate in France.
Latin in the Schools

Despite the growing legitimacy of French as a language of adnùnistra-
tion and the arts, Latin continued to occupy a central place in national

life, notably through the educational system and the church. Thornas
Pavel has described the life of the collèges during the classical age of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where students not orùy received
instruction in Latin but were obliged to speak it (even arnong thern-
selves) and permitted to read orùy the most reputable Latin authors. Di-
vided into centuries and decuries, they were rewarded for success in
their studies by the tides of senator and consul. A scholar's apprentice-
ship arnounted to litde more than the assimilation of a repertoire ofhis-
tories-lives of illustrious men and wornen of antiquity, famous sayings,
examples of strength and virtue. "In these closed collèges/' Pavel notes,
"carefuily isolated from the rest of the world ... the imaginary nature of
[ancient] rhetorical culture ... was celebrated each year by productions
of neo-Latin plays written fûr the benefit of the students."29
Érnile Durkheim, in his lectures on education in France, described
this world in the same vein: "The Greco-Rornan rrrilieu in which stu-
dents were made to live was emptied of ail Greek and Rornan reality, so
that it became a sort of unreal, ideal place, populated no doubt by figures
who had lived in the past but who, presented in this way, no longer had
anything of the past about them. They were emblematic figures, nothing
more, illustrating virtues, vices, ail the great passions of humanity . . .
Types so general, so indeterminate, [that they] could easily serve to ex-
emplify the precepts of Christian morality." The sole pedagogical inno-
vation introduced before the second half of the eighteenth century
originated in the Petites Écoles des Messieurs de Port-Royal (opened in
r643 in Port-Royal and three years later in Paris), the first secondary
schools to ailow a place for French in the curriculum. "Port-Royal,"
noted Durkheirrl, "did not lirnit itself to protesting against the absolute
prohibition that had been placed upon [the teaching ofj French ... but
chailenged the suprenlacy that, by unanimous opinion, had been attri-
buted until then, throughout the Renaissance, to Latin and Greek."30
And Peilisson himself, the historian of the Académie Française and
historiographer to the king, testified to the influence of Latin in the
training of "the learned men" of his time: "On leaving school 1 was
given 1 know not how many new novels and plays, which, young and
childish though 1 was, 1 did not cease to ITlOck, always returning to my
Cicero and my Terence, which 1 found rrmch more reasonable."31
The batde of the "moderns" against the teaching of Latin began quite
early. In r657 Monsieur Le Grand, Sieur des Herrninières, led the attack
TIte Invention ofLiterature 1 59

on "pédants,"32 whose heads he clairned were so full of ancient lan-
guages that they were incapable of using French correctly:
No doubt minds that are encumbered with Greek and Latin, that
know so many things of no use in their own language, that burden
their discourse with learned nonsense and elaborate pedantry, can
never acquire the natural purity and naïve expression that are essential
and necessary to compose a truly French prayer. So many different
granmlars and locutions are at war in their heads that there is a chaos
of idioms and dialects: the construction of one sentence contradicts
the syntax of another. Greek contaminates Latin, and Latin contanù-
nates Greek, while Greek and Latin combined corrupt French . . .
They are familiar with the dead languages and cannot use the living. 33
Ten years later, Louis Le Laboureur, in his treatise Des avantages de la

langue française sur la langue latine (Advantages of the French Language
over the Latin Language, 1667), addressed the question whether the
early education of the dauphin, the eldest son of Louis XlV, ought to be
devoted to the "Latin Muses" or the "French Muses." But the learning
of Latin enforced by the schools had made bilingualisln a reality, and
classical culture, despite the growing acceptance of the modern tongue,
continued to furnish a repertoire of models and themes that were long
to nourish literary composition in French.
The Use of French as a Spoken Language

The first great codifier of the language and of poetry was, of course,
François de Malherbe (1555"-1628). He was also for this reason the sec-
ond great revolutionary of the French language; and although he was
opposed to the aesthetics of the Pléiade and to the poetry of Philippe
Desportes-a disciple of Ronsard-he may be considered a direct suc-
cess or to du Bellay insofar as he pursued by other Ineans the same enter-
prise of "enriching" French. But Malherbe was an innovator who found
a way to escape the problern of imitation: once what was needed had
been irnported from Latin, the true differences between the two lan-
guages could be afEnned.
Malherbe, as is weil known, attached priority to the need to encour-
age a refined use of the spoken language. He sought to invent an "oral
prose"34 that would make it possible to recreate the "charrn," the
"sweetness," and the "naturalness" that were peculiar to the French lan-

guage while helping to devise norms of "proper speech," which stood in
contrast to the abstraction of a language that was only written, and for
that very reason dead: Latin. Malherbe also carried out a literary revolu-
tion by rejecting, like du Bellay, two traditions: on the one hand, the
worldly and precious poetry of the courtiers and the verse of the
learned men and the neo-Latin poets ("in order to rnock those who
wrote verse in Latin," his disciple Racan recalled, "he said that if Vergil
and Horace were to corne back to life, they would take the whip to
Bourbon and Sirrnond") ;35 and, on the other hand, the practice of the
Pléiade's descendants, who freely used many dialect words, ernployed a
convoluted syntax, and practiced esotericism. Malherbe sought instead
to affirrn and codifY the unarguable "beauties" of French, and thereby
establish a standard of proper and euphonious usage on the basis of
the particular characteristics of the living language. This did not me an
having to forgo irnitation of Latin rnasters. To the contrary, Malherbe
wished to reconcile the revolution introduced by the Pléiade, namely
the irnportation of Latin techniques to the French language (to which
he added the "clarity" and "precision" inherited frorn Ciceronian prose
and the elegance of Virgilian verse), with a desire to liberate French-
through the vital and malleable use of the spoken tongue--from the
sluggishness induced by unimaginative imitation. This doctrine, which
rapidly gained acceptance among the ruling classes (not only the srnall
elite of magistrates and nlen of letters from which Malherbe hÎlnself
came, but also the court nobility), enabled French poetry to continue
the process of accumulating literary resources begun by the Pléiade
while avoiding the danger ofbecoming fossilized (as was the case in It-
aly) through too "faithful" imitation of ancient Inodels.
Malherbe's call for elegant usage and "naturalness" (by contrast with
precious "archaisln"), cOlnbined with his insistence on the need to cul-
tivate the spoken, living language, which otherwise risked being frozen
in written lTIodels, therefore gave additional impetus to the creation of a
specifically French stock of literary and linguistic capital. The famous
reference to the "hay-pitchers at the Port-au-Foin"-with its im.plica-
tion than an "ignorant" layman's rnastery of the royal tongue was surer
than that of the learned humanists-is clear evidence of Malherbe's de-
sire to break with the inertia of scholarly rnodels. 36 The attelnpt to cre-
ate a new oral prose, unencumbered by the rigidities of ancient and Re-
naissance canons, was to revolutionize the whole of French letters and,
The Invention of Literature 1 6l

notwithstanding the lexical and gramrnatical codifications to which it
gave rise, give poets the fi-eedoITl the innovate.
Surprisingly, the sarne strategy was later to be employed in a variety of
donunated literary spaces located in very different times and contexts. In
Brazil during the 1920S, for example, modernists cailed for the standard-
ization and literary use of a "Brazilian language" on the basis of a sirnilar
oral prose, relegating to the past the static norrns of Portuguese-"the
language of Carnoes"-which was likened in much the sarne way to a
dead language. In the United States at the end of the nineteenth century,
Mark Twain founded the modern Arnerican novel through the intro-
duction of an oral, popular language by which he declared his opposi-
tion to the norrns of literary English. In both cases, association of lit--
erature with the development of a changing and unfinished language,
abandoning oIder, sclerotic models, ITlade it possible to accumulate fresh
literary resources.
Claude Favre de Vaugelas (1585-1660) took up the task begun by

Malherbe with his Remarques sur la langue françoise (Remarks on the
French Language, 1647). This was a sort of "linguistic courtesy book,"37
consisting of recommendations for defining the bon usage of spoken lan-
guage that relied on the rules of conversation of "society" and the liter-
ary practice of the best authors: "Here then is how good Usage is de-
fined ... it is the manner of speaking of the soundest part of the Court,
in conforrnity with the manner of writing of the soundest Authors of
the time. When l say the Court, l understand by it women as weil as
ITlen, and various persons from the city where the Prince resides, who,
through their cOlnmunication with the people of the Court, share in its
good tas te [politesse] ."38 The ünportance attached to the conversation
of "society," now regarded as the standard of proper speech and the
model of good writing, is a patent sign of the distinctive character
of French linguistic capital during its phase of accumulation, which un-
derwrote innovation within the literary language and within newly
codified genres. Because the written was subordinate to the oral, literary
fornls that were usuaily the rnost fixed and unchanging, especiaily ones
associated with the models of antiquity, were able to develop ITlOre rap-
idly than in other countries, such as Italy, where archaic written models
continued to serve as the basis for the spoken usage of the common lan-
guage.

THE CULT OF LANGUAGE
With the quasi-permanent establishrnent of the king and his entourage
in Paris at the end of the sixteenth century, and then throughout the
seventeenth century the centralization and strengthening of monarchi-
cal power, which reached its height during the reign of Louis XlV, there
was a corresponding shift of virtually all intellectual activity to Paris.
The capital's preeminence was accornpanied by the growing influence
of the court and the increasing power of salons, where the various ele-
ments of the world of letters met-scholars and gentlernen, well-bred
ladies (whose essential role in the dissemination of a new art of living
and conversing has been much ernphasized), scientists and poets. And it
was through these salons that the issue of language carne to be discussed
by the ruling class as a whole. In no other part of the world during this
period were the proper use of language and literary art taken out of the
hands of teachers and scholars and placed in the service of and art ofliv-
ing and conversation to the degree they were in France. "The king's
French, Parisian French, was being transforrned," Furnaroli notes, "by
literate conversation into the living language at once most concerned
with its own distinctive character, originality, and naturalness and most
eager to borrow the stylistic traits that humanist philologists had praised
in Ciceronian prose."39
The intense effort at codification undertaken during the seventeenth
century has long been attributed to the "aesthetic sensibilities" of the
grarrlillarians: since the "exuberance of the sixteenth century [hadJ left a
great deal of 'linguistic untidiness' to be cleared up," it was necessary to
restore the order, symmetry, and harmony of the language. 4o Walther
von Wartburg, for exalnple, interpreted the gralnmarians' concern as the
expression of a political imperative, namely that France dispose of a sin-
gle and uniform language in order to improve social communication af-
ter the anarchy and disorder of earlier tirnes. On this view, the ruling
class joined together to defend the long-term interests of the country.41
One might have thought, to the contrary, that the codification of French
was the result of a system of shifting alliances and rivalries between
grammarians and gentlemen, officers of the Chancellery, jurists, and
nlerrlbers of the worlds of letters and polite society-a system that
worked to produce definitions of good usage and to formulate the prin-
ciples on which these were based, including rules governing poetic
composition, while appealing to the exarrlple of the most prestigious au-
The Invention ofLiterature 1 63

thors in order to establish criteria oflinguistic correctness. The rivalries
among doctes and mondains} writers, grarnrnarians, and courtiers 42 gave
rise to an extraordinary and altogether novel debate of irnrnense social
irnport, the like of which was found nowhere else in Europe. 43 Fer-
dinand Brunot's observation that the "reign of grarnnlar ... was rrlore
tyrannical and long-lasting in France than in any other country" per-
fectly captures its speciallinguistic and literary character. 44 ln no other
country were prescriptive works concerning vocabulary, grarrlmar, speil-
ing, and pronunciation nlore numerous. 45
A turning point occurred around 1630, when Descartes chose to re-
nounce Latin-until then the language of philosophy-and cornposed
several irnportant works in French, lTIOSt notably the Discours de la
méthode (Discourse on Method, 1637), at the end ofwhich he eXplained
his decision by saying, "1 expect that those who use only their natural
reason in ail its purity will be better judges of my opinions than those
w~o give credence only to the writings of the ancients."46 A generation
later, the Grammaire générale et raisonnée (General and Analytical GralTI-
mar, 1660), by Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot, better known as
the "Port-Royal gramrnar," was to rely on the Cartesian method in ad-
vancing the idea of an "analytical" grammatical doctrine.
The "standardization" of the French language du ring the seventeenth
century cannot be reduced, then, to a simple need for improved COlTI-
munication in order to prOlTIote political centralization. 47 lnstead it was
a matter of gathering the various resources-theoretical, logical, aes-
thetic, rhetorical-necessary for creating literary value and for trans-
fornùng the "langue françoyse" into a literary language. This process
anlounted to a sort of aestheticization, or progressive littérarisation} which
in a relatively short time endowed French with the autonomy it needed
to become the language of literature. "Throughout the seventeenth
century," Anthony Lodge notes, "the symbolic value oflanguage and the
nlost rninute refinements of the linguistic norm were central preoccu-
pations of the upper echelons of a society where [as Brunot put it]
'beauty oflanguage is one of the chief ways of distinguishing oneself."'48
Language therefore became the object and purpose of a unique fornl of
belief.
ln 1637 the Hôtel de Rarnbouillet found itselfparty to a "gramrnati-
cal dispute" over the word car (rneaning "because" or "for"). This unfor-
tunate conjunction had aroused Malherbe's the displeasure-Gornber-

ville congratulated himself on having avoided it in the Bve volumes
of his Exil de Polexandre et d} Ériclée (Exile of Polexander and Ericlea,
1629 )-with the result that the matter was brought to the attention of
the Acaderny, which studied it with an attentiveness later mocked by
Saint-Évremont in his comedy Les Académistes (The Equestrian Masters,
1650). The Academy's preference for pour ce que led to a war of pam-
phlets. Mlle. de Rarrlbouillet called upon Vincent Voiture, a leader of
the society faction, to come to the rescue. Voiture responded with a plea
for the defense that parodied the "noble" style:
At a time when fortune stages tragic dramas in all parts of Europe, 1

see nothing so worthy of pity as when 1 see that one is prepared to
hunt down and bring to trial a word that has so usefully served this
monarchy and that, in all the troubles of the kingdom, has always
shown itself to be good French ... 1 do not know for what reason
they try to take away from car what belongs to it in order to give this
to pour ce que} nor why they wish to say with three words what they
can say with three letters. What is most to be feared, Mademoiselle, is
that in the wake of this injustice others will be undertaken. There will
be no difficulty attacking mais} and 1 do not know if si will long be
safe. So that after all the words that link the others have been removed,
the great minds will wish to reduce us to the language of the angels,
or, if this cannot be done, they will oblige us at least to speak orùy
through signs ... Yet it happens that after having lived for eleven hun-
dred years, full of strength and credit, after having been employed in
the most important treaties and having always honorably assisted in
the deliberations of our kings, it faus sudderùy into disgrace and finds
itself threatened with a violent end. The moment is not far off, 1 fèar,
when mournful voices will be heard to fill the air, which will say: le
grand car est mort} and the dernise neither of the great Cam nor of the
great Pan would seem to me so important or so strange. 49
By the beginning of the reign of Louis XIV in 1661, the accumulated

capital of French was so great, and the belief in the power of this lan-·
guage so strong, that its victory over Latin and its triumph throughout
Europe began to be celebrated. In 1667 Louis Le Laboureur published
Des avantages de la langue française sur la langue latine} as though it were still
necessary to affirm the preerninence of French; four years later, however,
in 1671, Father Bouhours' Entretiens d}Ariste et d}Eugène (Conversations
between Ariste and Eugene) appeared, a work that praised the superior-
The Invention of Literature 1 65

ity of French "not only to the other modern languages but also to Latin,
even to the perfected Latin of the early imperial age."so And in 1676
François Charpentier, in his Difense de la langue françoise pour l'inscription
de l'Arc de triomphe (Defense of the French Language for the Inscription
on the Triunlphal Arch), asserted that the French language was more
"universal" than Latin at the time when the Rornan Ernpire was at the
height of its power and, a fortiori, than the neo-Latin of the doctes.
Charpentier styled his monarch "a second Augustus," claiming that
"like Augustus, he is the Love of Peoples; the Restorer of the State; the
Founder of laws and of Public Happiness ... Ali the Fine Arts have felt
the effects of this Marvelous Progress. Poetry, Eloquence, Music-all
these have attained a degree of excellence never before equalled."Sl
The following decade saw the quarrel between the ancients and the
rnoderns pit the director of the Academy, Charles Perrault, whose poem
Le siècle de Louis le Grand (The Century of Louis the Great, r 687) as-
serted the superiority of his monarch's century over that of Augustus
Caesar, against Boileau (supported by La Bruyère, La Fontaine, and oth-
ers).S2 The triumph of the moderns was to mark the end of the age
opened by du Bellay in r 549. By the end of the seventeenth century the
moderns could claim to have put an end to the supremacy of the an-
cients, vindicating du Bellay's strategy of irnitating classical texts for the
purpose of appropriating their resources. In the meantirne, however, the
rnoderns had taken a new tack: inutation was now held to be useless, and
the pro cess of importation and ernancipation was finished. In the four
volumes of his Parallèles des anciens et des modernes (Parallels between the
Ancients and the Moderns, 1688-r697), Perrault claimed preeminence
for the moderns in ail genres, holding that in the seventeenth century
the arts had been brought to a higher degree of perfection than they en-
joyed among the ancients. Those who were rightly called "classics," and
who borrowed their references and literary nl0dels from antiquity, made
Perrault's manifesto possible: they were reckoned to mark the apogee of
the century of Louis XIV, the triumph of French language and literature,
because they had achieved the greatest possible "increase" ofliterary re-
sources. In their works, and in the language they used, they incarnated
the victory of French over Latin. Perrault could announce his opposi-
tion to the policy of imitating the ancients and proclaim the end of the
reign of Latin precisely because these writers had put an end to the pro-
cess of imitation by bringing it to its most extreme point. The achieve-

ment of the nlOderns was to have reached the limits of literary freedorn
first glirnpsed by Greek and Latin authors: if Perrault granted not only
Corneille, Molière, Pascal, La Fontaine, and La Bruyère but also Voltaire,
Sarasin, and Saint-Arnant superiority over the ancients, it was because he
considered thern as having arrived at the sumrnÏt of perfection.
This is why one cannot reduce the quarrel, as traditionalliterary his-
toriography does, to sirnple political partisanship.53 The received view
openly endors es an anachronistic conception of history in making the
ancients supporters of the absolute rnonarchy and the moderns uphold-
ers of a rnore liberal fonn of government. But in that case how are we to
explain the unqualified apology for the reign of Louis XIV in Perrault's
Le siècle de Louis le Grand? Only an analysis of the historical accumula-
tion of literary capital within French literary space allows us to account
both for what was really at issue-the unspoken and specifically literary
basis of the quarrel, narnely the balance of power with Latin-and for
the political stakes of the conflict, which is to say the place and the
power of the language in the face of the dedining and contested hege-
Inony of Latin.
THE EMPIRE OF FRENCH

The triumph of French was now so cornplete, both in France and in the
rest of Europe, and its prestige so unchallengable, that its daim to superi-
ority came to be true as a rnatter of fact no less than of opinion; or
rather, it began to exist in fact because its truth was universally thought
to be obvious. The French had corne so fully to believe in the definitive
victory of their language over Latin, and moreoever had so cornpletely
succeeded in causing it to be believed by others (with the result that the
authority of the language was acknowledged by all other elites in Eu-
rope), that the use of French very quickly spread throughout the conti-
nent.With the wars of Louis XIV and the treaties that conduded thern,
French becarne the language of diplomacy and international agree-
Inents. This transnational usage established itself only by virtue of the
"ernpire," as Rivarol put it, over which French now "naturally" presided
because it had at last Inanaged, after a century and a half of struggle, to
accumulate literary resources, to overturn the power relations that for-
rnerly had subjected France, and with it the whole of Europe, to the
dornination of Latin.
French becarne aIrnost a second mother tongue in aristocratie cir-

des in Germany and Russia; elsewhere it was adopted as a sort of sec-
ond language of conversation and "civility." Belief in the supremacy of
French was strongest in the sInall German states. Throughout the eigh-
teenth century, and particularly during the years 1740-1770, the Ger-
man principalities were unsurpassed in their attachrnent to its worldly
use. Elsewhere, in central and eastern Europe, even in Italy, one finds the
sarne enthusiastic embrace of the French rnodel. Patent evidence of the
literary value that was attributed to it is supplied by the writers who
elected to compose their literary works in French: the Germans Gritnm
and Holbach, the Italians Galiani and Casanova, Catherine II of Russia
and Frederick II of Prussia, the Irishman Anthony Hamilton, and a
growing nmnber ofRussian authors who had abandoned Gennan in its
favor, among others.
The striking thing about the pretension of the French language to
universality, founded and modeled on that of Latin, is that it did not itn-
pos_e itself as a form of French domination; that is, as a system deliber-
ately organized in such a way as to redound to the advantage of France
as a nation. French came to be generally established, without the assis-
tance or cooperation of any political authority, as a common language-
the language of cultivated and refined conversation, exercising a sort of
jurisdiction that extended to all of Europe. Its cosmopolitan character is
evidence of the curious "denationalization" of French,54 whose domi-
nance, never recognized as national, was accepted instead as interna-
tional. It was neither a form of political power nor an example of cul-
tural influence in the service of a nation-state, but the vehide of a
symbolic suprernacy whose ramifications were long to be felt, never
more plainly than at the mornent when Paris emerged as the universal
capital ofliterature and began to administer its "governrrlent" (in Victor
Hugo's phrase) over the entire world. Thus, under Louis XV, Abbé
Desfontaines asked: "What is the source of this attraction to the lan-
guage coupled with aversion to the nation? It is the good tas te of those
who speak and write it naturally; it is the excellence of their composi-
tions, their turns of phrase, their subject matter. French superiority in
matters of delicate and refined luxury and sensuality has also helped our
language to travel. People adopt our terms with our fashions and finery,
about which they are extrerrlely curious."55
This reversaI of the terms of cultural domination in favor of French,

now regarded as the language of" civilization" (as the Gerrnans were to

say sorne years later), therefore rnarked the founding of a new "secular
international order."56 Indeed, the secularization of European political
and literary space stands out as one of the filndamental traits of the
French imperium. To the extent that it was the ultimate consequence of
the enterprise inaugurated by du Beilay and the hurnanists against the
supremacy of Latin, it can be understood as a first step in the direction of
autonorny for European literary space as a whole. Having succeeded in
escaping the influence and domination of the church, it rernained for
writers-this would be the work of the eighteenth and, especiaily, the
nineteenth century-to free thernselves first from dependency on the
king, and then from subjection to the national cause.
Clearly, this extraordinary belief in the perfection of the language of
the king was able to be accepted, not only by the entire French literary
world but by ail the European elites as weil, only because the enormity
of accumulated literary capital, and the singular character of the struggle
engaged in by French men and women of letters rnade it irresistible. But
this belief, as weil as the belief in the grandeur of what Voltaire was to
cail "the century of Louis XlV," also generated a system ofliterary, stylis-
tic, and linguistic representations whose effects can still be felt today.
Voltaire hirnself was perhaps the chief architect of the unequailed and
unmatchable grandeur of the French classical age. 57 ln Le siècle de Louis
XIV (The Century of Louis XlV, I75I), he constructed out of whole
cloth the myth of a golden age that was at once political and literary. He
invented the notion of an eternal classicism, created a nostalgia for the
glorious days of the Sun King, and above ail elevated those writers
henceforth cailed classic to an unattainable surnmit of literary art. By
giving a historie al appearance to the mythical conception ofhistory that
this belief assumed, he established the reign of Louis XIV as a "perfect"
age, which could only be reproduced or imitated:
It seems to me that when, in a century, one has had a sufficient num-

ber of good writers who have become classics, it is hardly permissible
to use expressions other than theirs, and that it is necessary to give
[such expressions] the same meaning, or else very shortly the present
century will no longer understand the previous century ... It was a
time worthy of the attention of times to come, when the heroes of
Corneille and Racine, the characters of Molière, the symphonies of
Lully, and (because here one is speaking only of the arts) the voices of
Bossuet and Bourdaloue made themselves heard by Louis XlV, by Ma-
dame, so famous for her taste, by Condé, Turenne, Colbert, and that
The Invefltion ofLiterature 1 69

throng of superior men who appeared in every genre. This time will
never be met with again, wh en the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, the au-
thor of the Maximes, on emerging from conversation with Pascal or
Arnauld, went to see a play by Corneille. 58
The beliefin the rnodel of French "classicism," and the avowed de ter-
rnination of writers and intellectuals to go beyond it, can be understood
only in terms of this notion of a "perfection" incarnated at a certain his-
torical mornent by a country with which there was no alternative but to
try to compete. In the same way, nearer to our time, one cannot com-
prehend the fàscination with the language of French classicism exhib-
ited by a writer such as E. M. Cioran, or his desire to reproduce it, with-
out taking into account the belief-inherited mainly from Germany-
in the unequaled state of perfection of the language and literature of
France.
One finds the doctrine of French classical perfection given full expres-
sion in the treatise De la littérature allemande, published in French by the
king ofPrussia in 1780. 59 1 have already observed that this text is an ex-
traordinary indication of the complete dominance enjoyed at the time
by the French language. But it nlust also be said that the conception of
history (and of the history of art) that underlies the book, and that was
to be upheld by future generations of German intellectuals and artists,
ascribed to classicism a sort of discontinuous pennanence, first mani-
fested by the Greece ofPlato and Demosthenes and continuing with the
Rome of Cicero and Augustus, the Italy of the Renaissance, and the
France of Louis XlV. Germany could not hope for a more brilliant des-
tiny than to assume its place in a universal history of culture, conceived
as a succession of "centuries" in which each nation in its turn incarnated
the classical ideal before stepping aside, overcorne by decadence, as an-
other slowly reached maturity.
ln order to make up for German "backwardness" and bring forth
new German "classics," Frederick II therefore needed to take the French
language as a rnodel:
under the reign of Louis XlV, French spread throughout Europe, and
this partly out of love for the admirable authors who then Bourished,
also for the excellent translations of the ancients that were made then.
And now this language has become a mas ter key that lets you into ev-
ery house and every city. Travel from Lisbon to Petersburg, and from

Stockholm to Naples speaking French, you will make yourself under-
stood everywhere. By this idiom alone, you spare yourself the need to
know a great many languages, which would overburden your memory
for words ... We shall have our classic authors; each person, in order
to profit from them, will wish to read them; our neighbors will learn
German, courts will speak it with delight; and it will come to pass that
our polished and perfected language extends on behalf of our admira-
ble Writers from one end of Europe to the other. 60
It was with this Voltaire an model, ratified by Frederick the Great, that
Herder was later to break.
Antoine de Rivarol's famous Discours de l'universalité de la langue française

(Discourse on the Universality of the French Language, 1784) was a re-
sponse to a series of questions set by the Academy of Berlin in its corn-
petition of the previous year: "What has made the French language uni-
versaI? Why does it merit this primacy? Is it to be presumed that it will
keep [this primacy]?" The very fact that the contest was announced in
these terms is the ultimate proof of undisputed French dominance-but
proof also that it had already entered into decline. Sorne twelve years
earlier, Johann Gottfried Herder had advanced the first arguments
against French universalism before the sarne acaderny in Berlin. His es-
say, Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (Treatise on the Origin of
Languages, 1772), served as the banner for the new national ideas that
were to be used as weapons in the struggle against French hegemony
and that were subsequently to spread throughout Europe. In effect, then,
Rivarol delivered a sort of funeral oration rather than a panegyric.
But Rivarol's Discourse nevertheless rnarked a crucial rnornent in the
formation of the French literary heritage: on the one hand, because it
brought together and reviewed ail the commonplaces underlying the
belief in the universality of French and, by stating thern in a clear and
organized way, made it possible to explain and understand the origin of
a fonn of cultural domination that was recognized and accepted in ail of
Europe; and, on the other, because it signaled the appearance of a new
and rising power across the Channel that called French sovereignty into
question. The campaign against the "empire" of French was henceforth
to be conducted on two fronts, England and Germany, with decisive
consequences for the structure of European literary space throughout
the nineteenth century.
In the opening sentence of the Discourse, Rivarol drew a parailel with
The Invention ofLiterature 1 71

the Roman Ernpire: "The tirne seems to have come to say [that] the
French world, as forrnerly the Roman world, and philosophy, having
grown weary of seeing rnen forever divided by the various interests of
politics, now rejoices at seeing thern, frorn one end of the earth to the
other, form themselves into a republic under the domination of a single
language."61 lt is necessary to recaIl the definition of universality as it was
understood in France (and as it was to be chaIlenged by Herder), narnely,
as the reestablishrnent of a unity in a world sundered by political rival-
ries. In other words, French dornination was accepted by one and aIl be-
cause it placed itself above aIl partisan advantage, personal or national:
"It is no longer rnerely the French language," Rivarol explained; "it is
the hurnan language." This sentence, often cited as proof of French arro-
gance, was actually another way of making the point that, owing to its
incontestable dorninion, the French language was not seen as an expres-
sion of national character, and therefore an instrurnent of the particular
interests of France and the French people, but rather as a universallan-
guage, which is to say one that belonged to aIl people and so rose above
national interests. With the Age of Louis XlV, France had COlne to exer-
cise a syrnbolic power that no military victory could have irnposed:
"Since this explosion," Rivarol went on to observe, "France has contin-
ued to provide surrounding states with theater, clothing, taste, rnanners,
a language, a new art of living, and novel pleasures-a kind of ernpire
that no other people has ever exercised. Cornpare it, 1 beg you, with that
of the Rornans, who everywhere disseminated their language and slav-
ery, battened on blood, and destroyed until they themselves were de-
stroyed."62 In other words, the power of French, by its very civility and
refinement, surpassed that of Latin.
This universality was in a sense founded on what Rivarol called the
"conflict of nations," which is to say the cornpetition and rivalry among
them. The victory of France and French, notwithstanding the merits of
aIl other languages-acknowledged in a very refined and cultivated
way-was due to its unmatched "clarity." In offering the customary ex-
planation for the intrinsic "superiority" of French over other languages,
Rivarol formulated what was already a commonplace with the extraor-
dinary arrogance characteristic of dominant powers: "What is not clear
is not French; what is not clear is only English, Italian, Greek, or Latin."63
The Discourse was also an engine of war, manufactured for the pur-
pose of fighting France 's rnost dangerous rival in this eternal conflict of

nations, the one that then challenged most directly the universal domi-
nation of French universality: England. The English and the French,
Rivarol wrote, were "neighboring and rival [peoples] who, having con-
tended for three hundred years, not over who would have empire, but
over who would exist, still fight over the glory of letters and for a cen-
tury have comrnanded the attention of the world." At bottorn, the ri-
valry with England grew out of the threat represented by its cormnercial
power. London had become in economic ter ms the richest and most
irnportant place in Europe. Rivarol was very careful not to confuse what
he called "the immense credit" enjoyed by the English in respect of
comrnerce with their supposed power in literature; to the contrary, he
tried to dissociate the two things so that France might be in a position to
perpetuate its literary ernpire, arguing that symbolic power could not be
inferred from economic power: "Accustomed to the immense credit
that he has in business, the Englishnlan seems to bear this fictive power
in letters, and his literature has contracted from it an exaggerated charac-
ter contrary to good taste."64 There is a hint in this of a distinction be-
tween an econornic order and a literary order; but because Rivarol was
not yet really able to formulate the concept of literary autonomy, he
could not imagine-as Valery Larbaud was to do two centuries later-a
literary map distinct frorn the political map.
The English Challenge

At the end of the eighteenth century, then, the great challenge to the
prevailing French order came from England. "The English," observed
Louis Réau, "boastful of their victories over Louis XIV, proud of the
new popularity of their literature as illustrated by Dryden, Addison,
Pope, and Swift, impatiently endured the pretensions of the French lan-
guage to universality."65 In England, the economic and political ascen-
dancy of the crown was accompanied by a codification of the language
and a specific daim to literary capital. Through the efforts of men oflet·-
ters, grammarians, and lexicographers, the main oudines ofEnglish in its
modern fonn were fixed.
The establishment of French as the official language following the
N orrnan Conquest in 1066 was to have lasting consequences, and it was
only in the fifteenth century that standard English ernerged. The pecu-
liarity of the history of the English nation is that the emancipation from
ROlnan ecdesiastical authority led, in the sixteenth century, to the trans·-
The Invention <if Literature 1 73

fer of all powers to the king: in proclairning himsel( by the Act of Su-
prenucy (1534), the supreme head of the Church of England, Henry
VIn seized a power that was absolute as rnuch in the political as in the
religious sphere. The standardization of the language was thus linked to
an attempt to establish uniforrn religious texts in English: the Great Bible
(1539), the Book ofCommon Prayer (1548), and the King)ames Bible ("Au-
thorized Version," 16II) were read at Sunday services throughout the
land. But the legitimation of the vernacular language occurred rather
belatedly. As in the Gerrnan case, the challenge to Rornan preerrunence
in theological matters prevented the dominance of Latin frorri being
contested in the realm oflearning and poetry-as though, as l suggested
earlier, the adoption of Protestant faiths sornehow prevented literary and
linguistic challenges to the established order from assuming a secular
form. Surely this is why, despite the schism, Latin conserved all its prop-
erly literary prestige for a very long time in England, and the work of
grarnrriarians was able to emancipate the conm1.on language from the
Greco-Latin rrlOdel only much later. 66
It was not until the eighteenth century that the results of this activity
were affirmed, but without the creation of any centrallegislative institu-
tion on the model of the Académie Française. "The setting of standards,"
Daniel Baggioni remarks, "was the business of gramnurians, men oflet-
ters, and pedagogues, ratified by a social consensus that was respectfi.Il of
established hierarchies."67 This apparent autonomy obscures a national
appropriation of literature that, without being linùted to England, was
no doubt particularly rnarked there. The habit of seeing literature as the
outstanding expression of national character, which is to say the chief
incarnation of national identity, is peculiarly English. 68 In England more
than anywhere else, literature became one of the principal devices for
the affirmation and definition of national identity, which in turn had a
great deal to do with the declared rivalry with France. Even if English
nationalism did not assmne the saille forms as in the rest of Europe-
and this is essential for understanding English "exceptionalism"-it is
fair to say that the definition of national identity in England was first
elaborated at the end of the eighteenth century in reaction against
French hegemony. This challenge took the forrn of a pronounced
Gallophobia that was unquestionably cornmensurate with French arro-
gance and assertions of supremacy. The task of national construction,
expressly undertaken in opposition to a France supposed to be hostile,

tyrannical, and Catholic, was based on the "difference" constituted by
Protestantism. 69 In the sarne way, literature was gradually nationalized-
which is to say designated as "English," as national property-and af-
firmed against French pretentions to preeminence.
Stereotypes of the English national character-likewise conceived as
a defense against the threat of French domination-were expressed and
developed through literatureJo The idea of an innate "genius" for indi-
vidualism and sincerity, for example, is closely bound up with a sense of
political identity directly opposed to that of France: thus the French
fondness for dialectical juxtapositions (between despotisrn and revolu-
tion, for example) was associated with artificial formality-the famous
"French polish"-and the doubtful morality of their literatureJl Simi-
lady, the notion of an English "gift" for liberty and representative gov-
ernment grew up in reaction to French political mythology and in com-
bination with a supposed and self-proclaimed inability to construct a
systern of thought based on general ideas--the talent of "English litera-
ture" consisting in a faithfulness to the richness and complexity of life
and a refusaI to reduce them to abstract categoriesJ2 These elelnents of
structural opposition to the hegemony of France made England its fore-
most rival in the wodd ofletters.
THE HERDERIAN REVOLUTION

Between 1820 and 1920 in Europe, alongside the nationalist nlovements
of the period, there occurred what Benedict Anderson has called a
"philological-Iexigraphic revolution." The theories ofJohann Gottfried
Herder (1744-1803), forrnulated in the late eighteenth century and
thereafter rapidly and widely disseminated, brought about the first en-
largement of literary space to include the European continent as a
whole. Herder not only proposed a new rnanner of contesting French
hegemony that was to be of value to Germany; he also provided the the-
oretical basis for the attempt made in politically dominated territories,
both in Europe and elsewhere, to invent their own solutions to the
problern of cultural dependence. By establishing a necessary link be-
tween nation and language, he encouraged ail peoples who sought rec-
ognition on equal terms with the established nations of the world to
stake their clairn to literary and political existence.
The ascendancy of the French literary and historical model and the
prestige of the philosophy of history that French culture implicitly, but
The Invention C!f Literature 1 75

nonetheless powerfuIly, transrnitted were such that Herder was obliged
to forge an utterly new set of theoretical and conceptual tools. One of
his tirst efforts in this direction, Auch eine Philosophie die Geschichte zur
Bildung der Menschheit (Another Philosophy of History for the Educa-
tion of Mankind, I774), anlounted to a dedaration of war against Vol-
taire's philosophy and his belief in the superiority of the "enlightened"
age of French dassicism over ail other periods of history. Herder, by
contrast, laid stress on the equal value of past ages, particularly the medi-
eval period, arguing that each epoch (and nation) possesses its own spe-
cial character and so must be judged according to its own criteria; 73 and
that each culture therefore has its own place and its own value, indepen-
dent of the place and value of others. He joined with Goethe and Moser
in arguing against "French taste" in Von deutscher Art und KUnst (On
German Style and Art, I773), a work notable for its admiration of
what for Herder were three incomparable examples of naturalness and
strength in literature: popular song, Ossian, and Shakespeare. They also
reprêsented so many weapons to be directed against the aristocratic and
CosITlOpolitan power of French universalism: the people; the literary tra-
dition issuing from sources other than Greco-Latin antiquity (as against
the "artifice" and "embeIlishment" of French culture, Herder advocated
a poetry that would be at once "authentic" and "immediately popular");
and, finally, England. The unequal distribution of power in the emerging
internationalliterary world helps explain why the Germans were to rely
on England and Shakespeare, its rnajor and incontestable source of cap-
ital: given two poles of opposition to French power, each would be able
to lend support to the other. In the same way, the critical reassessment of
Shakespeare by the German Romantics was used by the English to
daim hiITl as the chief repository of their nationalliterary wealth.
Herder sought to explain why Germany had not yet produced a univer-
sally recognized literature. Nations, he argued, likening thern to living
organisms, needed time to develop their own peculiar "genius." As for
Germany, it had not yet reached maturity. In caIling for a return to
"popular" languages, he devised a whoIly novel and genuinely revolu-
tionary strategy for accumulating literary capital that was to enable Ger-
many to overcome its "backwardness" and join at last in international
literary cornpetition. By granting each country and each people the
right to an existence and a dignity equal in principle to those of others,

in the name of "popular traditions" from which sprang a country's en-
tire cultural and historical developrnent, and by locating the source of
artistic fertility in the "soul" of peoples, Herder shattered all the hierar-
chies, all the assumptions that until then had unchallengably constituted
literary "nobility"-and this for a very long time.
The new definitions that he proposed both of language (the "mirror
of the people") and ofliterature ("language is the reservoir and content
of literature")-as he had described them earlier in Über die l1eure deut-
sche Literatur: Fragmente (Fragments concerning Recent Gerrnan Litera-
ture, 1767)-contradicted the dorninant aristocratic French conception
and, by exploding the notion ofliterary legitirnacy, changed the rules of
the international literary game. Since a nation's people were now re-
garded as the source and conservatory of literary inspiration, it thereby
became possible to gauge the "greatness" of a literature by the impor-
taqce and the "authenticity" of their traditions. This alternative notion
of literary legitimacy, at once national and popular, permitted the accu-
rnulation of another type of resource, unknown until then in the literary
world, that was to link literature still more closely with poli tics. Hence-
forth, all the "little" nations in Europe and elsewhere were able, on ac-
count of their ennoblement by the people, to daim an independent ex-
istence that was inseparably political and literary.
The Herder Effect

Herder's thought was to play a central role in rnodern German intellec-
tuallife. His ideas exercised a profound influence upon the Romantic
writers, who adopted his philosophy of history as well as his interest in
the medieval period, the East, and language; the same is true ofhis study
of comparative literature, and ofhis conception ofpoetry as the primary
vehide of national "education." Holderlin,]ean Paul, Novalis,WilheIrn
von Schlegel and his brother Friedrich, Schelling, Hegel, Schleier-
macher, and Humboldt were ail great readers of Herder. The very con-
cept of "ronuntic," in the sense of "modern"-by contrast with that of
"dassic" and "ancient"-has its origin in Herder's thought, which sup-
plied the basis for the Germans' daim to modernity in their struggle
against French cultural hegemony. It was with Moser and Herder that
the Gerrnans began to reproach France for "superficiality, frivolity, and
immorality while claiming for Gernuny solidity, integrity, and fide1-
ity."74
The Invention of Literature 1 77

With respect to the rest of Europe, it would be more accurate to
speak of a sort of "Herder effect," at least to the extent that outside Ger-
many it was more a question of the practical consequences flowing from
a few key ideas due to Herder than of the strictly theoretical and politi-
cal elaboration ofhis thinking. The Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der
Menschheit (Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind,
1784-179I)-unquestionably Herder's 1I1Ost famous work-enjoyed an
immense and immediate success in Hungary, where it was read in Ger-
man; and the brief chapter devoted to the Slavs in the Ideen had an elec-
trifying effect in the Balkans, where Herder was hailed as the "mas ter of
the Croat race" and "the first to defend and praise the Slavs."75 His rna-
jor theme, endlessly repeated by Hungarians, Romanians, Poles, Czechs,
Serbs, and Croats, was the right and the necessity of writing in one's na-
tive tongue. In Russia the work was known through the French transla-
tion by Edgar Quinet. In Argentina its political influence was great at
the end of the nineteenth century. In the United States the constellation
of thenles surnmarized by the formula "literature, nation, rnankind"
and popularized through the work of George Bancroft (one of fifteen
Americans who studied with Herder's disciples at Gottingen) consti-
tuted the chief doctrine of American l-lerderianism: "The literature of a
nation is national," Bancroft wrote.7 6 "Each [nation] bears in itself the
standard of perfection, totally independent of all comparison with that
of others."77
The equivalence between language and nation posited by Herder ex-
plains why the national dernands that appeared throughout Europe dur-
ing the nineteenth century were indissociable frorn linguistic demands.
The new national languages that were charnpioned had either come
close to disappearing from use during a period of political domina-
tion-as in the cases, for example, of Hungarian, Czech, Gaelic, Bulgar-
ian, and Greek-or existed only in the oral fonn of a patois or peasant
language-as in the cases of Slovene, Romanian, Norwegian, Slovak,
Ukrainian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Finnish, and so on.7 8 With the affir-
mation of a national culture, the language of the people-seen as the
instrument of ernancipation and the means for defining a distinctive
national character-very rapidly found (not always for the first time)
gralIunarians, lexicographers, and linguists ready to take responsibility
for its codification, writing, and teaching. The paramount role of writers
and, more broadly, intellectuals in the construction of national identity

explains to sorne extent the submission ofliterary and scholarly work to
national nonnsJ9
The collections of popular poetry and traditional songs edited by
Herder hirnself (and published before the famous folktales of the
Brothers Grinun) served as a model for the anthologies of folktales and
legends that were subsequently to appear throughout Europe. Between
1822 and 1827 the Czech writer Frantisek Celakovsky published three
volumes of Slavic folk songs, followed by a collection of fifteen thou-
sand Slavic proverbs and sayings; in Slovenia, Stanko Vraz published an
edition of Illyrian poerns; and Vuk Karadzic, encouraged by corres-
ondance with Jacob Grimm, brought together Serbian folk songs. The
young Henrik Ibsen, an enthusiastic adherent of the rnovernent to pro-
mote a national identity in Norway, set out a bit later to study the mani-
festations of the Norwegian "soul" arnong peasants.
In short, the "invention" of popular languages and literatures
throughout Europe in the nineteenth century (and later, as we shall see,
in other parts of the world as weil) corresponds exactly to the grammati-
zation undertaken in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which
had allowed emerging European nations to devise new weapons to
cornbat the still forrnidable domination of Latin. The upheaval brought
about in the republic of letters by what 1 have called the Herder efIect
can therefore be understood only by exarnining the genesis of interna-
tional space, sketched here in its broad outlines. Because entering liter-
ary space meant entering into a type of cornpetition, and because this
space was forrned and unified on the basis of the rivalries that emerged
within it, the new theoretical concepts that underlay the assault against
the established philosophical and literary order must be described and
recognized as so many instrurnents in the struggle for literary legitimacy.
Before the twentieth century in Europe, this struggle took the form of
an attempt to nationalize language and literature.
The period of decolonization, which began roughly after the Second

WorldWar (and which is not yet finished), marks the third great stage in
the forrnation of internationalliterary space. In one sense, it is only the
continuation and extension of the revolution inaugurated by Herder:
the newly independent nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin Arrlerica, obey-
ing the same political and cultural rnechanisms, moved to assert linguis-
tic and literary clairns of their own. The consequences of decoloniali-

zation in the literary world were of a piece with the national and literary
upheavals of nineteenth-century Europe, carrying on the Herderian
revolution by other means. Popular legitimacy, in the fOrIn of various
political avatars of the notion of the "people," provided these newcorn-
ers with a way to achieve linguistic and cultural autonorny.
As in Europe during the nineteenth century, recollection of popular
tales and legends nlade it possible to translate an oral tradition into writ-
ten literature. The first attempts by European folklorists to collect popu-
lar tales-an enterprise linked, as we have seen, to the romantic belief in
the "soul" and the "genius" of the people-subsequently found support
in the colonial science of ethnology, which worked to promote a reap-
propriated cultural identity. By perpetuating the belief in a popular
peasant "origin," it becalne possible to push further back in time the in-
ventory of an oral heritage that henceforth could be clairrled by a nation
as its own. Acting on the same belief in the singular and popular identity
of the nation, and in accordance with the same logic underlying the ac-
cumulation of literary and intellectuai wealth, writers frorn countries
enlerging froITl colonization set out to do what writers in European
countries had done before therrl, this tinle relying on the model pro-
vided by ethnology.
The linguistic question was raised in very similar terms as weIl. Like
ITlany European countries du ring the nineteenth century, the newly de-
colonized countries had often inherited languages having no real lit-
erary existence, associated instead with extensive oral traditions. The
choice facing these countries--whether to adopt the language of their
colonizers or to create their own linguistic and literary patrimony---ob-
viously depended on the wealth and literariness of these nonnative lan-
guages, but also on the level of econonùc development. Daniel Baggioni
has noted that the same problems that arose at the end of the nineteenth
century "for young nation-states such as Poland, Romania, Bulgaria,
Yugoslavia, Albania, and even Greece, which combined the disadvan-
tages of a largely agricultural and underdeveloped economy with mas-
sive illiteracy, recent and fragile national unity, a weak technological base,
and a srnall elite whose intellectuai interests lay abroad," were later expe-·
rienced by errlerging countries in Africa and Asia. 80
But the postcolonial situation is distinguished from what came before
by the fact that the use of European languages had been systematically
imposed in colonized territories, leading to greater complexity in the

forms of dependency that developed and therefore in the strategies
adopted to escape thern as weil. For a national literary space to corne
into being, a nation must attain true political independence; but because
the newest nations are also the ones that are the most vulnerable to po-
litical and economic domination, and because literary space is depen-
dent to one degree or another on political structures, international
fonns of literary dependency are to sorne extent correlated with the
structures of international political domination.
Writers in postcolonial nations on the periphery of international lit-
erary space therefore have to struggle not only against the predomi-
nance of national politics, as writers in the richest spaces do, but also
against international political forces. The external forces exerted upon
the least endowed literary spaces today assume the fonns of linguistic
domination and econornic domination (notably in the form of foreign
control over publishing), which is why proclamations of national inde-
pendence do not suffice to eliminate outside pressures. To one degree or
another, then, literary relations of power are forms of political relations
of power.
The Inventio11 ofLiterature 1 81

3 1 World Literary Space
There is one thing of which one can say neither that it is one metre long, nor that it is not
one metre long, and that is the standard metre in Paris.-But this is, of course, not to ascribe
any extraordinary property to it, but only to mark its peculiar role in the language-game of
measuring with a metre-rule.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophicallnvestigations
As people of the fringes, inhabitants of the suburbs of history, we Latin Americans are unin-
vited guests who have sneaked in through the West's back door, intruders who have arrived
at the feast of modernity as the lights are about to be put out. We arrive late everywhere, we
were born when it was already late in history, we have no past or, if we have one, we spit on
its remains.
-Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude
THE HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURE that orders the literary world is the direct
product of the history ofliterature in the sense 1 have described, but it is
also what makes this history. Indeed, one is tempted to say that literary
history is incarnated in the structure of the world of letters, which sup-
plies its motive force; that the events of the literary world take on mean-
ing through the structure that produces thenl and gives them form and,
in so doing, makes literature at once stake, resource, and belief.
In the world republic of letters, the richest spaces are also the oldest,
which is to say the ones that were the first to enter into literary compe-
tition and whose national classics came also to be regarded as universal
classics. The literary rnap that has taken shape in Europe since the six-
teenth century cannot be regarded, then, simply as the result of a graduaI
extension of literary belief or the ide a of literature (in keeping with the
farniliar irnage of the "dissemination," "fortune," or even "influence" of
a literary form or work). It is a consequence of the unequal structure (to
recall Fernand Braudel's phrase once again) of literary space, the uneven
distribution of resources arnong national literary spaces. In measuring
themselves against one other, these spaces slowly establish hierarchies
and relations of dependency that over tirne create a cornplex and dura-
ble design. "So the past always counts," as Braudel rightly insisted. "The
inequality of the world is the result of structural realities [that are] at
once slow to take shape and slow to fade away ... An economy, society,
civilization or political cornplex finds it very hard to live down a depen-
dent past."l So, too, the structure of the literary world lastingly perpetu-
ates itself despite the various transfonnations it appears to undergo, par-
ticularly in its political aspect.
The world of letters is a relatively unified space characterized by the
opposition between the great nationalliterary spaces, which are also the
oldest-and, accordingly, the best endowed-and those literary spaces
that have more recently appeared and that are poor by cornparison.
Henry James, who chose English nationality as though it were a matter
almost of literary salvation, who made the gap between the American
and European worlds the subject of a great part ofhis work, and who in
his own practice ofliterature had direct experience of the literary desti-
tution of America at the end of the nineteenth century, lucidly de-
scribed art as a flower that can flourish only in a thick soil. It takes a
great deal ofhistory, as James once remarked, to produce a little bit oflit-
erature.
But it is not sufficient to imagine a sirnple binary opposition between
dominant and dominated literary spaces. One would do better to speak
of a continuum} for the rnany fonns of antagonism to which domination
gives rise prevent a linear hierarchy from establishing itself Obviously,
not ail those who are literarily dominated find themselves in the same
situation. Their common condition of dependency does not imply that
they can be described in terms of the same categories: each one is de-
pendent in a specific way. Even within the ITlOSt richly endowed region
ofliterary space-which is to say in Europe, which was the first to en-
ter into transnational cornpetition-one finds newer literatures that are
World Literary Space 1 83

dominated by older ones. This is notably the case in nations that long
remained subject to external political control, as in central and eastern
Europe, or to colonial domination, as in the case of Ireland. It is neces-
sary also to include in this group-which rnay be thought of as a subset
of outlying are as within a larger central space-ail those countries that
were dominated not politically but literarily, through language and cul-
ture, such as Belgiurn, French-speaking and German-speaking Switzer-
land, Austria, and so on.
These dominated areas within Europe were the cradle of the great lit-
erary revolutions. As heirs by language and shared culture to the richest
traditions in the world ofletters, already by the tirne the first nationalist
clairns began to be asserted in the nineteenth century they had accumu-
lated sufficient assets of their own to cause upheavals that were regis-
tered in the centers, upsetting the old hierarchies of the established liter-
ary order. Thus between 1890 and 1930, in a literarily destitute country
unger colonial rule, there occurred one of the greatest literary revolu-
tions-the "Irish miracle"-marked by the appearance of three or four
of the most irnportant writers of the twentieth century. The case of
Franz Kafka illustra tes the same point: although he belonged to an
emerging Czech literary space and took an enthusiastic interest in the
Jewish nationalist movernent, he managed to create one of the most
enigmatic and innovative bodies of work of the century by virtue of the
fa ct that he was heir to the whole of German language and culture-an
heir who nonetheless sought to subvert his inheritance.
The same logic applies to the formation and development of Arneri-
can literatures. The new states that emerged in the Americas at the end
of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries do not
lend thernselves to interpretation in terms of the Herderian model, in
part because decolonization in these regions was achieved by Creoles-
persons of European descent born in the Americas: "Language was not
an element that differentiated them from their respective imperial
metropoles," as Benedict Anderson observes. "[It] was never even an is-w
sue in these early struggles for national liberation."2 Nor were what
Marc Ferro cails "colonist-independence movements," which unfolded
between 1760 and 1830 in the United States, the Spanish colonies, and
Brazil, consequences of the revolution Herder inaugurated;3 they were
the product instead of the spread of the French Enlightenment, and re-
lied on a critique of imperial "anciens régimes" that ignored the whole

notion of popular belief: founded on nation, people, and language ..f Ex-
amining the distinctive characteristics of Latin American history, the
Venezuelan writer and inteIlectual Arturo Uslar Pietri (I906-200I) de-
scribed the originality of Arnerica in relation to other colonized coun-
tries: "Our case is different, original," he wrote, "above aIl because the
Arnerican continent has known frorn the beginning, and, through lan-
guage and religion, the rnost sensitive cultural fibers there are, an inte-
gration with Western culture that the other areas of European expan-
sion never knew. Latin America [is] a living and creative part of this
whole region, the West, which is steeped in particularities; and why not
calI it the ExtremeWest, since it possesses distinctive signs that no rnod-
ern empire has engendered?"5
Both North American and Latin American literature are therefore
the direct descendants, through the colonists who dernanded indepen-
dence frorn their horne countries, of European literatures. The freedorn
to build upon the literary heritage of England, Spain, and Portugal en-
abled them in the twentieth century to trigger unprecedented liter-
ary upheavals (of which the works of Faulkner, Garcia Marquez, and
Guimaraes Rosa are the three outstanding examples). By appropriating
the literary and linguistic assets of the European countries whose heri-
tage they clairned, the writers of the Arnericas succeeded in establishing
a sort of transatlantic patrimony. "My classics are those of my language,"
Octavio Paz stated unequivocaIly. "1 consider myself to be a descendant
of Lope and Quevedo, as any Spanish writer would ... Yet 1 arn not a
Spaniard. 1 think that most writers of Spanish America would say the
sarne, as would writers from the United States, Brazil, and Francophone
Canada with regard to the English, Portuguese, and French traditions."6
ROADS TO FREEDOM
The construction of nationalliterary space is closely related, as we have
seen, to the political space of the nation that it helps build in turn. But in
the most endowed literary spaces the age and volurne of their capital-
together with the prestige and international recognition these things
imply-combine to bring about the independence ofliterary space as a
whole. The oldest literary fields are therefore the nlost autonornous as
weIl, which is to say the most exclusively devoted to literature as an ac-
tivity having no need ofjustification beyond itself. The scale of their re-
sources gives them the means to develop, in opposition to the nation

and its strictly political interests, a history and logic of their own that are
irreducible to politics.
Literary space translates political and national issues into its own
terms-aesthetic, forrnal, narrative, poetic-and at once afErrns and de-
nies them. Though it is not altogether free from political domination,
literature has its own ways and means of asserting a rneasure of indepen-
dence; of constituting itself as a distinct world in opposition to the na-
tion and nationalisrn, a world in which external concerns appear only in
refracted form, transformed and reinterpreted in literary terrns and with
literary instruments. In the most autonornous countries, then, literature
cannot be reduced to political interests or used to suit national purposes.
It is in these countries that the independent laws of literature are in-
vented, and that the extraordinary and improbable construction of what
may properly be referred to as the autonomous international space of
literature is carried out.
This very long process, through which autonomy is achieved and
literary capital hoarded, 7 tends also to obscure the political origins oflit-
erature; and, by causing the link between literature and nation to be for-
gotten, encourages a belief in the existence of a literature that is com-
pletely pure, beyond the reach of time and history. Paradoxically, it is
time itself that enables literature to free itself frorn history. But if still to-
day (and even in those countries that are the freest) literature remains
the most conservative of the arts, which is to say the one that is the most
subject to traditional conventions and norms of representation--norms
fro111 which painters and sculptors, through the revolution of abstrac-
tion, were long ago liberated-this is because the denied link with the
political nation, camouflaged by well-worn euphemisms, remains very
powerfu1. 8
Autonomy is nonetheless a fundamental aspect of world literary
space. The most independent territories of the literary world are able to
state their own law, to lay down the specifie standards and principles ap-
plied by their internaI hierarchies, and to evaluate works and pronounce
judgments without regard for political and national divisions. Indeed,
autonomy amounts to its own categorical irnperative, enjoining writers
everywhere to stand united against literary nationalis111, against the in-
trusion of politics into literary life. In other words, the structural inter-
nationalism of the rnost literary countries strengthens and guarantees
their independence. Autono111Y in the world of letters is always relative.
86 1 THE WORLO REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

In France, the volume of accumulated capital was so great, and the liter-
ary domination exerted over the whole of Europe from the eighteenth
century onward so uncontested (and indeed incontestable), that it be-
came the rnost autonomous literary space of ail, which is to say the freest
in relation to political and national institutions.
The ernancipation of literary activity in France frorn many, if not ail,
of the constraints of politicallife had one striking consequence. French
literary space, having imposed itself as universal, was adopted as a model:
not insofar as it was French, but insofar as it was autonomous-which is
to say purely literary. In other words, French literary capital belonged
not to France alone, but to ail nations. Indeed, it is this very capacity for
being universalized, or denationalized, that ailows varying degrees of au-
tonorny arnong literary spaces to be recognized. Valery Larbaud, by vir-
tue of his position as one of the most eminent figures in French letters
responsible for introducing a great deal of world literature to Paris, was
able to state what was to become the fundamental article of faith in the
great literary centers: "Every French writer is international, he is a poet,
a writer for ail of Europe and for a part of America as weil ... Ail that
which is 'national' is siily, archaic, disreputably patriotic ... It served a
purpose under certain circumstances, but that time has passed. There is
nowa country ofEurope."9
It was through this very process of ernancipation from national poli-
tics that Paris became the world capital of literature in the nineteenth
century. Because France was the least national of literary nations, it was
able to manufacture a universalliterature while consecrating works pro-
duced in outlying territories-impressing the stamp of littérarité upon
texts that came from farflung lands, thereby denationalizing and depar-
ticularizing them, declaring them to be acceptable as legal tender in ail
the countries under its literary jurisdiction. Thanks to its promotion of
the law of universality in the world ofletters against the ordinary politi-
callaws of nations, France became an alternative model for writers from
every part of the literary world who aspired to autonomy.
THE GREENWICH MERIDIAN OF LlTERATURE

The unification of literary space through competition presumes the ex-
istence of a common standard for measuring tirne, an absolute point of
reference unconditionaily recognized by ail contestants. It is at once a
point in space, the center of ail centers (which even literary rivals, by the

very fact of their cOITlpetition, are agreed in acknowledging), and a basis
for rneasuring the tirne that is peculiar to literature. Events that "leave a
mark" on the literary world have a "ternpo" (to use Pierre Bourdieu's
terrns) that is unique to this world and that is not-or is not nec essar-
ily-"synchronous" with the measure of historical (which is to say po-
litical) tirne that is established as official and legitimate. 1o Literary space
creates a present on the basis of which all positions can be rneasured, a
point in relation to which ail other points can be located. Just as the
fictive line known as the prime meridian, arbitrarily chosen for the de-
termination of longitude, contributes to the real organization of the
world and makes possible the measure of distances and the location of
positions on the surface of the earth, so what might be cailed the Green-
wich rneridian ofliterature makes it possible to estimate the relative aes-
thetic distance from the center of the world of letters of ail those who
belong to it. This aesthetic distance is also measured in ternporal terms,
since the prime meridian determines the present of literary creation,
which is to say modernity. The aesthetic distance of a work or corpus of
works from the center may thus be measured by their teITlporal remove
from the canons that, at the precise moment of estimation, define the lit-
erary present. In this sense one may say that a work is conteITlpOrary;
that it is IT10re or less current (as opposed to being out of date-tempo-
ral metaphors abound in the language of criticism), depending on its
proximity to the criteria of modernity; that it is modern or avant-garde
(as opposed to being acadernic, which is to say based on outITlOded
rnodels that belong to the literary past or otherwise fail to conform to
the criteria that at any given moment determine the present).
Gertrude Stein neatly summed up the question of the localization of

modernity in a single phrase: "Paris," she wrote in Paris) France (r 940),
"was where the 20th century was."ll As site of the literary present and
capital of modernity, Paris to some extent owed its position to the fact
that it was where fashion-the outstanding expression of modernity--
was made. In the farnous Paris Guide of r867, Victor Hugo insisted on
the authority of the City of Light, not only in political and inteilectual
matters but also in the do main of tas te and elegance, which is to say of
fashion and everything ITlOdern: "1 defy you," he declared, "to wear an-
other hat than the hat of Paris. The ribbon worn by the woman in the
street [in Paris] rules. In every country, the way in which this ribbon is

tied has the force of law." This law was part and parcel of what Hugo
identified as the city's special authority:
Paris, it needs to be emphasized, is a government. This government

has neither judges, nor police, nor soldiers, nor ambassadors; it oper-
ates through infiltration, which is to say omnipotence. It fails drop by
drop upon humanity and everywhere leaves its impression. Apart from
whoever officially exercises authority, above or below, lower or higher,
Paris exists, and its way of existing rules. Its books, its newspapers, its
theater, its industry, its art, its science, its philosophy, the procedures as--
sociated with its science, the fashions that are part of its philosophy, its
good and its bad, its good and its evil-ail these things arouse the spirit
of nations and lead them. 12
The ability to decree without fear of challenge what is or is not

"fashionable," in the dornain of haute couture and elsewhere, permitted
Paris to control one of the main routes of access to rnodernity. Stein de-
scribed the link between fàshion and rIlodernity in her own ironie faux-
nalVe way:
And so in the beginning of the twentieth century when a new way

had to be found naturally they needed France ... It was important too
that Paris was where fashions were made . . . and so quite naturally
Paris which has always made fashions was where everyone went in
I900 . . . It is funny about art and literature, fashions being part of it.
Two years ago everybody was saying that France was down and out,
was sinking to be a second-rate power, etcetera, etcetera. And l said
but l do not think so because not for years not since the war have hats
been as various and lovely and as french as they are now ... l do not
believe that when the characteristic art and literature of a country is
active and fresh l do not think that country is in its decline ... So
Paris was the place that suited those of us that were to create the twen-
tieth century art and literature, naturaily enough. 13
By combining ail these structural elements, Paris managed to sus tain its
position-at least until the 196os-as the center of the systern ofliterary
time.
The temporallaw of the world ofletters rnay be stated thus: it is neces-
sary to be old in order to have any chance <?f being modern or of decreeing what is
modern. In other words, having a long national past is the condition of
being able to daim a literary existence that is fully recognized in the
f,iVOrld Literary Space 1 89

present. This is what du Bellay had in mind when he conceded, in The
Dqènse and Illustration of the French Language, that the handicap of French
in the battle against Latin was what he called its "lateness." At stake in
the competition between literary centers, all of which by definition en-
joy the privilege of antiquity, is mastery ofjust this measure of tirne (and
space), which is to say the power to dairn for oneselfthe legitimate pres-
ent ofliterature and to canonize its great writers. Among all the central
spaces that contend with each other by virtue of the antiquity and no-
bility of their literature, it is the Greenwich meridian, the source ofliter-
ary time, that stands as the capital ofliterature--the capital of capitals.
The continually redefined present ofliterary life constitutes a univer-
saI artistic dock by which writers must regulate their work if they wish
to attain legitimacy. If modernity is the sole present moment of litera-
ture, which is to say what makes it possible to institute a rneasure of time,
the literary Greenwich meridian makes it possible to evaluate and rec-
ognize the quality of a work or, to the contrary, to dismiss a work as an
anachronism or to label it "provincial." It needs to be emphasized that
the relative notions of aesthetic "backwardness" and "advance," which
all writers have in the back of their minds (though the structure of the
literary world is never explicitly described in su ch terms, since one of
the unwritten laws of the world republic of letters requires that literary
talent and recognition be universal), are not introduced here in order to
lay down some fixed and immutable definition of literature. N onethe-
less the existence and influence of these notions needs to be acknowl-
edged, without any judgment being made as to their value or normative
character, for they are part of the logic of temporal cornpetition.
Frederick II ofPrussia, who, as we have seen, wished to bring his people

into the European literary world at the end of the eighteenth century,
proposed his own version of German backwardness together with a
chronology of the formation ofliterary space: "1 am dismayed not to be
able to lay out for you a rnore ample Catalogue of our good produc-
tions: 1 do not accuse the Nation: it lacks neither spirit nor genius, but it
has been delayed by causes that have prevented it from growing up at the
sanIe time as its neighbors." It was therefore a question, considering the
logic of literary competition, of ma king up for lost time in order to
overcome its backwardness: "We are asharned," he wrote, "that in certain
genres we cannot equal our neighbors, [and so] we desire through tire-

less efforts to make up for the time that our calarnities have caused us to
lose ... there can be little doubt that, [ta king note of] such feelings, the
Muses willlead us in our turn into the Ternple of Glory." This curious
delay was the source of what the Prussian king readily acknowledged to
be a special fonn of poverty, which implied the existence of a literary
rnarketplace characterized by great inequalities: "Let us therefore not
imitate the poor who wish to pass for the rich, let us acknowledge our
destitution in good faith; that this rnay encourage us instead to obtain by
our own efforts the treasures of Literature, whose possession will raise
national glory to its full height."14
What Is Modernity?
Modernity's connection with fashion is a sign of its inherent instability.
It is also inevitably an occasion of rivalry and competition: because the
ITlOdern by definition is always new, and therefore open to challenge, the
only way in literary space to be truly ITlOdern is to contest the present as
outrnoded-to appeal to a still more present present, as yet unknown,
which thus becornes the newest certified present. The success of new-
conlers to literary space and time in breaking into the ranks of the estab-
lished moderns, and earning for themselves the right to take part in de-
bates over the definition of the latest modernity, therefore depends to
sorne extent on their farniliarity with the IT10St recent innovations in
fonn and technique.
The necessity ofbeing up-to-date in order to obtain recognition ex-
plains why the concept of ITlOdernity is so frequently and so emphati-
cally invoked by writers clairning to embody literary innovation, frmu
its first formulation by Baudelaire in the rnid-nineteenth century to the
very naITle of the review founded by Sartre a hundred years later-Les
Temps Modernes. One thinks of Rimbaud's famous injunction ("One
rnust be absolutely ITlOdern"); also of the modernismo founded by Rubén
Dario at the end of the nineteenth century, the Brazilian modernist
rnovernent of the I92os, and "futurist" movements in Italy and in Rus-
sia. 15 The rushing after lost tirne, the frantic quest for the present, the
rage to be "conternporaries of all rnankind" (as Octavio Paz put it)-al1
these things are typical of the search for a way to enter literary tirne and
thereby to attain artistic salvation. 16 Danilo Kis perfectly expressed the
iIuportance of this extraordinary belief in literary modernity: "1 still
want to be nl0dern. But 1 don't nlean that because things are constantly
fiVàrld Literary Space 1 91

changing we need to keep up with them; 1 rnean that there is something
in the way a work is written and the times in which it is written that
rnakes it part of its age."17
The rnodern work is condemned to become dated unless, by achiev-
ing the status of a classic, it manages to free itself frorn the fluctuations of
taste and critical opinion. ("We pass our tirne arguing over tastes and
colors," Valéry observed. "It is the same at the stock exchange, on count-
less juries, in the Academies, and it cannot be otherwise") .18 Literarily
speaking, a classic is a work that rises above competition and so escapes
the bidding of tirne. Only in this way can a modern work be rescued
from aging, by being declared timeless and immortal. The classic incar-
nates literary legitimacy itself, which is to say what is recognized as con-
stituting Literature; what, in serving as a unit of measure, supplies the ba-
sis for deterrnining the limits of that which is considered to be literary.
AIL writers from countries that are remote from literary capitals refer,
consciously or unconsciously, to a rneasure of time that takes for granted
the existence of a literary present. Determined by the highest critical au-
thorities, this rnoment confers legitimacy on certain books by including
thern arnong those works judged to be contemporary. Thus Octavio Paz
(1914-1998), in the passage from The Labyrinth of Solitude that serves as
an epigraph to this chapter, spoke of Latin Americans as "inhabitants of
the suburbs ofhistory ... intruders who have arrived at the feast of mo-
dernity as the lights are about to be put out"--people who "were born
when it was already late in history."19 In his 1990 Nobel Prize accep-
tance speech-significantly titled "La busqueda del presente" (In Search
of the Present)-Paz described his discovery at a very young age of a cu-
rious dislocation of time, and his subsequent quest-poetic, historical,
and aesthetic-for a present that his country's separation from Europe
("a constant feature of our spiritual history") had deprived him of con-
tact with:
1 must have been about six. One of my cousins, who was a little older,
showed me a North American magazine with a photograph of soI-
diers marching down a wide avenue, probably in New York. "They've
returned from the war," she said . . . But for me, the war had taken
place in another time, not here and now . . . 1 feh dislodged from the
present. Mter that, time began to fracture more and more. And space,

to multiply . . . l feIt that my world was disintegrating, that the real
present was somewhere else. My time ... was a fictitious time ... that
was how my expulsion from the present began . . . For us Spanish
Americans this present was not in our own countries: it was the time
lived by others-by the English, the French, the Germans. It was the
time of New York, Paris, London. 20
What Paz recounts here is nothing other th an his personal discovery

of central tirrle, which is to say his own decentering, his own sense of
disadvantaged rernoteness. The process of unification, in art no less than
in poli tics, assurnes a common measure of absolute time that supersedes
other temporalities, whether of nations, families, or personal experience.
Paz's realization that he lived in a place outside real time and history (this
present that was "somewhere else") was succeeded by a sudden aware-
ness of a schisn1 in the world, which led him to set out in search of the
present: "The search for the present is not the pursuit of an earthly para-
dise or of a tirneless eternity; it is the search for reality ... we had to go
and look for it and bring it back home."21 This quest was an attempt to
find a way out from the "fictitious time" reserved for the national space
into which he had been born and to gain entry to the real time of inter-
nationallife.
But it was the discovery of another present that forced him to ac-
knowledge his backwardness as a writer. He found that there also ex-
isted a time specific to literature, a rneasure of literary rnodernity:
"These years were also the years of my discovery of literature. 1 began
writing poems ... Only now have 1 understood that there was a secret
relationship between what 1 have called my expulsion from the present
and the writing of poetry ... 1 was searchingfar the gateway ta the present. 1
wanted to belong to my time and to my century. Later, this desire be-
came an obsession: 1 wanted to be a modern poet. My search for rnoder-
nity had begun."22 ln searching for the poetical present, he joined in the
hunt with poets from other nations and thus, by accepting the rules and
stakes of this competition, acquired an international identity. It was this
discovery of a whole new world of literary and aesthetic possibilities-
possibilities unknown to Mexico-that caused Paz to aspire to be a uni-
versaI poet. On the other hand, he discovered also that he was inevitably
starting behind the other con1petitors. The recognition of central time
as the only legitimate rneasure of political and artistic achievement is an

effect of the domination exercised by the powerful; but it is a dorni-
nation that is recognized and accepted by outsiders while rernaining
wholly unknown to the inhabitants of the centers, who are also (and es-
pecially) unaware of their role in producing literary time and its associ-
ated unit of historical rneasure. Resolved to bring back to his own
country the true present, Paz succeeded spectacularly, winning the No-
bel Prize-the highest honor the world republic ofletters has to give-
while at the same time developing an analysis of "Mexicanness."
This specifically literary form of time is perceptible only by those
writers on the peripheries of the world ofletters who, in their openness
to international experience, seek to end what they see as their exile from
literature. "National" writers, by contrast, whether they live in central or
outlying countries, are united in ignoring world competition (and
therefore literary time) and in considering only the local norms and
lirnits assigned to literary practice by their homelands. lndeed, it would
not he going too far to say that the only true moderns, the only ones
fully to recognize and know the literature of the present, are those who
are aware of the existence of this system of literary timekeeping and
who, as a result, acknowledge the farce of the aesthetic revolutions that
have shaped world literary space and the internationallaws that struc-
ture it.
The link between spatial and temporal views ofliterary distance is con-
densed in the image, very common among writers on the literary pe-
ripheries, of the "province."23 Thus, for example, the Peruvian author
Mario Vargas Llosa (b. 1936) recalled his discovery of Sartre in the 1950S:
What could [his] works oller to a Latin American adolescent? They

could save him from provincialism, immunize him against rustic
views, make him feel dissatisfied with that local colour, [with that]
superficial literature with its Manichaean structures and simplistic
techniques-Rômulo Gallegos, Eustasio Rivera, Jorge Icaza, Ciro
Alegria ...-which was still our model and which repeated, unwit-
tingly, the themes and fashions of European naturalism imported half a
century previously.24
Danilo Ris, in a 1973 interview with a Belgrade journalist, described the

literature ofhis country in very sirnilar terms: "In our country we con-
tinue to write a poor prose, anachronistic in expression and themes, en-

tirely dependent on the tradition of the nineteenth century, a tirnid
prose, fearful of experinlentation, regional, local-a prose in which local
color serves mairùy as a means of trying to preserve national identity, as
the essence of prose."25 These reflections were echoed in an essay of the
same period: "1 see rny own work, rny own defeat, in the provincial set-
ting where it developed, where it was allowed to develop, as a small, dis-
tinct defeat in the parade of our defeats, as a permanent and consistent
attempt to escape this spiritual province, through myths, themes, and
technical devices."26
The recurrence of this theme of the literary province-strictly speak-
ing, a sort of disinherited country-is further evidence of the represen-
tation of the literary world by writers themselves as one of inequality;
and, more generally, of a literary geography that can never be completely
superirnposed upon the political geography of the world's nations. The
gap between "capital" and "province" (which is to say between past and
present, between ancient and rnodern) is an aspect of the world ofletters
that is perceived only by those who are not quite of their tÎlne. This gap
is not merely temporal and spatial; it is also aesthetic (indeed, aesthetics is
simply another name for literary time). And the orny boundary---at
once abstract, real, and necessary-that provincial writers are agreed in
recognizing is what 1 have called the Greenwich meridian ofliterature.
The orny way for an Irishrnan around 1900 (such as James Joyce) or
for an Arnerican around 1930 (such as William Faulkner) to reject the
literary nonns of London, to challenge its condemnation or its indiffer-
ence; the orny way for a Nicaraguan around 1890 (such as Rubén Dano)
to turn away from Spanish acadernic literary practice; for a Yugoslav
around 1970 (such as Danilo Kis) to refuse subrnission to the aesthetic
conditions imposed by Moscow; for a Portuguese around 1995 (such as
Ant6nio Lobo Antunes) to escape the restrictive conventions of his na-
tive country was to turn toward Paris. Because its verdicts were the rnost
autonOIIlOUS (that is, the least national) in the literary world, it consti-
tuted a court of final appeal. This is why Joyce, for example, ultimately
chose exile in Paris and a strategy of dual refusaI: by rejecting not orny
the subrnission to colonial power that exile in London would have rep-
resented, but equally any display of conforrnity to the national literary
norms of lreland, he was free to carry out an enterprise of unprece-
dented daring and novelty.
Paris also attracted writers who came to the center to equip them-

selves with the knowledge and technical expertise ofliterary rnodernity
in order then to revolutionize the literature of their hornelands through
the innovations that they brought back with thern. Having rnade their
reputation in the center, sorne of these innova tors were able to acceler-
ate literary tinle, as it were, in their native countries. This was notably to
be the case, as we shall see, with Faulkner, who in order to evoke an ar-
chaic world created a new novelistic form, recognized and consecrated
in Paris. For this he was subsequently held up as a model by writers in
many outlying regions of the literary world who found thernselves in an
equivalent structural position.
The sarne argurnent can be used to analyze two exernplary cases: the
Nicaraguan poet Rubén Dano (1867-1916), a central figure in the liter-
ary history of Latin America and Spain who, though he was not conse-
crated by Paris, rearranged the literary landscape of the Hispanie world
by i!Tlporting the latest edition of modernity frOlTl Paris; and the great
Danish literary critic Georg Brandes (1842-1927), who in the late nine-
teenth century overturned the traditionalliterary and aesthetic assump-
tions of the Seandinavian countries by applying the principles of French
naturalism. Their appropriation of the innovations and techniques of
modernity won both of them fame in their respective cultural areas
while also perrnitting thern to create an autononl0US pole in spaces that
until then had been reserved for politicalliterature.
Dano's first volurnes of verse, Azul, published in Valparaiso in 1888,
and Prosas profanas) which came out in Buenos Aires in 1896, broke with
the whole poetic tradition of the Spanish language. 27 The revolution
that Dario engineered under the name of modernism grew out of his
deterrnination to introduce into the Spanish language and Spanish pros-
ody the form.s and sounds peculiar to French: "AccustOlned as l was to
the eternal Spanish cliché of the 'Golden Age,' and to its indecisive
nl0dern poetry, 1 found among the French ... a literar}' mine ta exploit. "28
What he called "mental Gallicisrn"-the introduction of French sounds
and turrlS of phrase into Castilian-was an extreme (and yet, owing to
the prestige of Paris, literarily acceptable) forrn of a larger revoIt against
the literary order of the Spanish-speaking world. In availing himself of
the literary power of France, Dano succeeded in changing the terms
of Hispanic aesthetic debate and in irnposing French modernism, first
upon Latin America and then, reversing the terms of colonial subjuga-

tion, upon Spain as weIl. As he put it in an article published in La Nacion
of Buenos Aires in 1895: "My dream was to write in French ... Was not
the course of events that would lead Spanish to this renaissance destined
to play itself out in Arnerica, from the rnoment that, in Spain, the lan-
guage carne to be waIled in by tradition, surrounded and spiked [like a
parapet] with Spanishisms?" Dano's scarcely veiled attacks signaled his
intention to launch a literary revolution that would sweep away aIl the
clichés imposed by Spain on its American colonies. He stressed the
backwardness of Spanish poetry ("waIled in by tradition"), the better to
contrast it with modernist novelty: "My success-it would be ridiculous
not to acknowledge it-has been due to novelty. Now what was this
novelty? It was rnental GaIlicism."29 It was this stunning innovation-
rnore precisely, renovation-that Jorge Luis Borges referred to in an in·..
terview in Argentina published in 1986:
l was fully convinced that, with the Golden Age ... Spanish poetry
had entered into de cadence ... Everything became rigid ... And then
we have the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century, both of them
very poor ... And then Rubén Dario came along and made every-
thing new again. The renewal began in America and then came to
Spain and inspired great poets such as the Machados and Juan Ram6n
Jimenez, to cite only [three]; but undoubtedly there were others ...
[Dario] was certainly the first of these renovators ... [u]nder the influ-
ence, of course, of Edgar Allen Poe.What a curious thing---Poe was
an American: he was born in Boston and died in Baltimore; but he
came to our poetry because Baudelaire translated him ... So [the] in-
fluence [exerted by all these poets] was French in a way.30
In the Scandinavian countries, those who recognized the supremacy

of Paris were deterrnined to combat the Gerrnan cultural ascendancy of
the period, which had so thoroughly dorninated their nations through-
out the nineteenth century that they were now little more than aesthetic
provinces of Gerrnany. Georg Brandes had lived in Paris for several years
and brought back to Denrnark the naturalism he discovered there,
together with the work of Taine, thus helping found the rnovement
known as Det moderne Gennembrud) or the "modern breakthrough."
Brandes sun1ITled up his approach in a single exhortation: "Subrnit
problems to discussion."31 ln this way he hoped it would be possible to
create a literature on the model of French naturalism, opposed to the
VVOrld Literary Space 1 97

idealism advocated by Gerrnan tradition, that could express social, polit-
ical, and aesthetic problerns and criticize established values. His six vol-
urnes of critical essays, written between 1871 and 1890 and coilected
under the title HovedstYfJmninger i det nittende Aarhundredes Litteratur
(Main Currents in Nineteenth-Century Literature), profoundly altered
the literary landscape of the Scandinavian world, exerting a decisive in-
fluence not only in Denmark, where writers such as Holger Drachmann
and J. P.Jacobsen elnbraced his ideas, but also in Norway (with Bj0rnson
and Ibsen) and Sweden (with Strindberg).32
Moreover, Brandes' book Det moderne Gejennembruds Maend (Eminent
Authors of the Nineteenth Century, 1883) launched a literary and cul-
tural movernent that had important political ramifications as weil: "po-
litical radicalisrn, literary realisrn and naturalism, the ernancipation of
wonlen,33 atheism and religious liberalism . . . [and] the ernergence of
popular education" were ail considered, particularly in Sweden, to be
historicaily linked to the "modern breakthrough."34 The paradox is that
it was necessary to accept the domination of Paris in order to be freed
frorn German control. But the "modern breakthrough" was not a sirnple
reproduction of the revolutionary theoretical and literary discoveries
rnade in Paris; it was an example of the liberation rnade possible by in-
novations irnported from Paris-innovations that Paris neither imposed
nor dictated, any more than it gave them their form. Instead, it supplied
the model for thern.
The Danish novelist Henrik Stangerup recails the experience ofboth
his father, Hakon Stangerup, and his grandfather, Hjalrnar Soderberg (a
very famous writer in his native Sweden, whose anti-German bias was
thought sc andalous at a time wh en the great rnajority of Swedish intel-
lectuals were pro-Gennan), 35 in describing his own relationship with
French rnodernism today:
From the beginning [my grandfather] was close to Georg Brandes,

who was a Dreyfusard. Brandes' review was the first outside France to
publish Zola's ''j'accuse.'' Soderberg began his career writing articles
on antisemitism in Europe. He died in I941. He cmnrnitted suicide in
a state of mind very sirnilar to that of Stefan Zweig: he had left Swe-
den in I906 to settle in Copenhagen, where he lived the rest ofhis life,
and he was persuaded that Hitler was going to win the war ... My fa-
ther was a literary critic, a Francophile as weil; he translated many
French writers, though his France was rather that of Mauriac and

Maurois. l came to Paris in I956, and this was my France, that of Sartre
and Camus. Since l had studied theology and since l came from the
land of Kierkegaard, existentialism was my first intellectual adventure.
And so there are three Frances in my head: that of my grandfather at
the turn of the century, Dreyfusard France; my father's France, more
conservative; and rnine. 36
Stangerup's own novels are marked by this intellectual and national

dichotemy:
In Vejen til Lagoa Santa [The Road to Lagoa Santa, I98I], German cul-
ture played a great role. Historically we had always been inspired by
Germany-the "big brother." Kierkegaard was inspired by Germany
and at the same time he revolted against Hegel and German philoso-
phy. The Danish naturalist Lund in my novel challenges the positivism
inherited from German culture. He becomes a Brazilian. But in the
nineteenth century, Danish culture was above ail a theological culture.
It was the pastors who formed the intelligentsia in Denmark. And
then, like the Germans, the Danish are Lutherans.With M0ller, the
great literary critic in Denmark during the I840s-who figures in my
novel Det er svaert at do i Dieppe [The Seducer, I98s]-France entered
Danish literature for the first time ... Ali the writers who made Dan-
ish literature-with the exception of those who chose internal exile,
such as Kierkegaard, who made only two trips to Berlin-were great
travelers. Unquestionably the greatest of them was Hans Christian
Andersen, whose travel writing has been completely ignored in
France. It was Andersen's dream, and Brandes' dream as well, to be
translated into French. 37
The changes introduced by Dano and Brandes in their respective na--

tional, linguistic, and culural spaces had less to do with literary innova-
tion than with speeding up literary time. They were not so much revo-
lutions as an attempt to bring literature up to date. They irnported to
regions that until then had been far rernoved from the Greenwich me-
ridian upheavals that had already occurred in the center and that Ina de it
possible to measure literary time. Moreover, they gave these regions the
assets they needed to enter world competition at once by offering them
access to the latest aesthetic innovations-in each case through a gigan-
tic diversion of literary capital. Though the authors and critics behind
these modernizing movements could not themselves be hailed by Paris
as innovators, they contributed powerfully to the unification of literary

space by introducing a measure of autonorny in their regions through
the model of Parisian rnodernity.
Like the cosrnopolitans of the center, whose structural counterparts
in a sense they are, "eccentric" cosrnopolitans on the outer edges of the
literary world also contribute to the production of literary value as
agents of what Rarnuz called "the universal bank of foreign ex change
and commerce." Their translations are essential elernents in the unifica-
tion of literary space, assisting the diffusion of the great revolutions car-
ried out in the center and so sharing in the universal credit of the inno-
vations they help transmit.
Anachronisms
AnachronislTI is characteristic of areas distant frorn the literary Green-
wich rneridian. Thus the Brazilian literary critic Antonio Candido
describes the literary "backwardness and underdevelopnlent" of Latin
Am~rica as a consequence of its "cultural penury." What is striking
about this region, he observes,
is the way aesthetically anachronistic works were considered valid ...

This is what occurred with naturalism in the novel, which arrived a
little late and has prolonged itself until now with no essential break in
continuity, though modifYing its modalities . . . So, when naturalism
was already only a survival of an outdated genre in Europe, among us
it could still be an ingredient of legitimate literary formulas, such as
the social novel of the 193 os and l 940s. 38
Naturalism-"adapted to the Spanish style" (in Juan Benet's phrase),

"imported a century earlier" (as Mario Vargas Llosa put it),39 converted
into a mere technique of "picturesque" description-was the tool of in-
ternational exoticism par excellence. Like folklore and regionalism, ex-
oticism seeks to describe the distinctive character (whether local, na-
tional, or regional) of a place through the use-without their authors'
being aware of it, as Vargas Llosa remarks-of aesthetic instruments that
have long been outmoded where they were first devised, in a sort of
spontaneous reinvention of Herderianism. Thus Benet spoke of the "lo-
cal color," the "folk perspective" of the Spanish novel of the 1950s: "The
novel was reduced to the picturesque; it portrayed the tavern, the street,
the boardinghouse, the small restaurant, the small family facing financial
difficulties."40 Local color and the picturesque are attempts to depict a
100 1 THE WORLO REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

particular reality using the rnost cornrnonplace and ordinary aesthetic
rneans.
The relative backwardness and poverty of such regions are not per-
manent conditions: not an writers on the periphery are inevitably "con-
dernned" to backwardness, any more than writers from the center are
necessarily modern. To the contrary, very different literary temporalities
(and therefore aesthetics and theories) may be found in a given national
space, with the result that not infrequently one finds writers who are
nearer to ones quite distant in geographical terms than to writers of
their own generation and nationality who share the sarne culture and
the same language. The specifie logic of the literary world, which ig-
nores ordinary geography and establishes territories and boundaries
along lines quite different from those of nations, makes it possible, for
example, to connect James Joyce, an Irishman, with Arno Schmidt, a
German, or with the Serb Danilo Kis and the Argentine Jorge Luis
Borges; or Urnberto Eco, an Italian, with the Spaniard Arturo Pérez-
Reverte and the Serbian Milorad Pavié. Conversely, within spaces hav-
ing the greatest endowment of literary resources, one encounters writ-
ers (often acadernics if not also acadernicians) whose work lags years be-
hind that of their compatriots; as believers in the eternal nature of
conventional aesthetic forms, they go on endlessly reproducing obsolete
models. The rnoderns, on the other hand, relendessly pursue the inven-
tion, or reinvention, ofliterature.
These discrepancies explain the difficulties that specialists in cornpara-

tive literature face in trying to establish transnational periodizations. The
model of world literary space proposed here, because it is not con-
structed according to evolutionary principles, makes it possible to com-
pare writers who are not contemporary in the usual sense with refer-
ence to a Ineasure of literary time that is relatively independent of the
political chronologies that for the most part still organize histories oflit-
erature. Thus the global dissernination of a particular stylistic innovation
originating in the center (which, for any given moment of literary his-
tory, marks the present) allows us to sketch the structure of the literary
field in space and time, or, better perhaps, in a time that has become
space. Consider, for example, the international success and diffusion of
the naturalistic novel, a genuine literary revolution whose chief rnonu-
ment is Émile Zola's series of novels Les Rougon-Macquart (r87r--r893).
f/V<Jrld Literary Space 1 101

Zola's rnoment of triumph in Germany rnay be placed between 1883
and 1888, by which point his success in France was beginning to decline.
Joseph Jurt has insisted on the delay in translation and on the "time-Iag
that separated French literary space from German literary space," noting
that in France "the great period of naturalist success fell between 1877
(L'Assommoir) and 1880 (Le roman expérimental). "41 The 1880s in Paris
saw the ernergence of rival tendencies: the psychological novel, with
the appearance of Bourget's Essais de psychologie contemporaine (Essays
in Contemporary Psychology, 1883); the publication of Huysmans' À
rebours (Against the Grain, 1884); and the rise of a new group of natural-
ist writers. These challenges to naturalism in its original form occurred
in Germany only at the beginning of the following decade, with the
publication of Hennann Bahr's Die Überwindung des Naturalismus (The
Overcoming of Naturalism, 189 1), which proclaimed the advent of a
new literature based on the integration of the possibilities opened up
by Bourget's psychology and Zola's naturalism. The time-Iag between
events that leave a mark on the literary Greenwich meridian and the
moment when their repercussions begin to be felt abroad remains con-
stant.
In Spain in the 1880s, French naturalism-considered as a literary
revolution having both fonnal and political aspects-was the object of
long and fierce debate. On the one hand, it was an instrument for criti-
cizing the moralism and confonnity of forms associated with the post-
roman tic Spanish nove!. But it was also a tool of social criticism: the
widely denounced "crudeness" ofZola's descriptions was a way of liter-
arily subverting aIl the conventions and conservative tendencies of the
day, in art as weIl as in society. Zola's introducer and translator in Spain,
Leopoldo Alas (1852-1901), who wrote under the name of Clarîn, was
one of the most passionate defenders of naturalism, both as a theorist
and as a novelist in his own right; the author of rnore than 2,000 articles,
he regarded literary journalism as a "hygienic" struggle waged in the
narne of progress. During the sarne period, Emilia Pardo Bazan (1852---
1921) published La cuestion palpitante (The Burning Question, 1883), a
collection of essays on the realistic novel and French naturalisrn.
By allying themselves with the literary present, modernists in Spain
and elsewhere were able to relegate nationalliterary conventions to the
past, using an irnported tool to bring about a decisive rupture in national
literary chronology. N aturalism pennitted writers in aIl parts of the
I02 1 THE WORlD REPUBLIC OF lETTERS

world who wished to fi-ee thernselves from the yoke of academicisrn and
conservatism (which is to say, of the literary past) to obtain access to mo-
dernity. In much the same way, the dates rnarking the publication and
critical acclairn of James Joyce's work in the various lingl.listic and na-
tional do mains of world literary space furnish another measure of its dif-
ferent temporalities: Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, foundational texts of
literary rnodernity since their translation into French by Valery Larbaud,
consititute one of the great indices-along with naturalism, surrealism,
and the work of Faulkner-of distance frolTl the Greenwich meridian.
If literature is defined, then, as a unified international field (or a field
in the process ofbeing unified), the international transmission of major
revolutions such as naturalisrn and rornanticisrn can no longer be de~
scribed using the language either of "influence" or of "reception." To
explain the introduction of new aesthetic norms with reference only to
print-runs, critical notices in newspapers and literary reviews, and trans-
lations assurnes, in ettect, the existence of two synchronic and equallit-
erary worlds. Plainly, this will not do. Only by analyzing revolutions in
terms of the specifie geography of literature and its unique measure of
aesthetic tirrle, which is to say in terms of the balance of power and
competition that organizes the literary field--the terrlporal geography
that 1 have just attempted to describe-will it be possible to understand
how a foreign work is actually received and integrated.
LlTERARY NATIONALISM
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when several autonorrlOUS
literary fields had already appeared, Herder's theories reaffirmed the
connection between poli tics and literature and established a second pole
in the world of letters. Henceforth the connection between literature
and the nation, no longer an automatic stage in the constitution of a lit-
erary space, was seen as something needing to be achieved. The revolu-
tion brought about by Herder did not transform the nature of the struc-
tural bond linking literature (and language) with nation; to the contrary,
Herder strengthened this bond by making it explicit. Instead of neglect-
ing historical dependency, he made it a cornerstone of nationalist claims
to independence.
Structural dependency in relation to political authorities and national
interests was a characteristic feature, as we have already seen, of the first
literary spaces that appeared in Europe between the sixteenth and eigh-
VVôrld Literary Space 1 103

teenth centuries. The differentiation of European political space that be-
gan in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries rested in large part
on the crucial role daimed for vernaculars, which served as "difference
markers." In other words, the various rivalries that emerged in the intel-
lectual world of the Renaissance were able du ring this period to gain
support and daim legitimacy for themselves through political contest.
The attenIpt to establish a standard language and to bring a written liter-
ature into existence very quickly came to be identified with the attempt
to ünpose the legitimacy of a new sovereign state. By the sarne token,
the Herder effect did not alter in any profound way the rules of the great
game of literature inaugurated by du Bellay; it simply modified the
mode of access to it. For all those who discovered that they were late in
corning to literary competition, the popular definition ofliterary legiti-
macy advanced by Herder offered a new point of entry.
In addition to the general scherna laid out in The Dijènse and Illustra-
tion) then, the strategies of the rnost literarily deprived need to be taken
into account as well. During the nineteenth century, and throughout the
whole period of decolonization in the twentieth century, they were to
make the popular criterion in literature an essential tool for the inven-
tion of new literatures and for the entry of new contestants into the
world ofletters. In the case of "small" countries, the enIergence of a new
literature is indissociable fronl the appearance of a new nation. Indeed, if
literature was directly associated with the state in pre-Herderian Europe,
it was only with the dissemination of national ideas in Europe during
the nineteenth century that literary daims to existence came in their
turn to assurne national fornl. Not only in Ireland at the end of the
nineteenth century, but also in Catalonia, Martinique, and Quebec to-
day, as well as in other regions where nationalist nIovements in politics
and literature have ernerged, literary spaces have been able to appear in
the absence of a fornully constituted state.
The new logic that now asserted itself against the definition of litera-
ture as an autonomous enterprise worked to enlarge the literary world
and to promote the entry of new players into literary competition while
at the same time introducing new criteria of legitimacy that were easily
politicized. Herder's identification of language with nation, and of po-
etry with the "genius of the people," supplied new weapons in the
struggle for independence, with the Éurther result that literary spaces
shaped by his thinking were also the most heteronornous, which is to say
I04 1 THE WORlD REPUBlIC OF LETTERS

the IT10St dependent on political authority at the nationallevel. The idea
of the inevitable "nationalization" of literatures, which thereby became
"national literatures"-an explicit forrn of subrrussion by literary au-
thorities to political divisions-gained currency with the emergence of
this political pole. Its influence over the whole of internationalliterary
space was to have innumerable consequences, since the new farm oflit-
erary legitimacy that flowed from it stood in contrast to that of the
French universalist rrlOdel.With the advent of this new politico-literary
pole, constituted in opposition to the autonOITlOUS pole, the whole of
world literary space came to be structured around two antagonistic
sources of attraction.
The emphasis on the "soulfulness" of a people that German theorists of

the nation placed at the heart of their analysis subsequently served to le-
gitimize a curious sophisrrl: inteilectual production depends on both
language and nation, but literary texts express "the founding principle
of the nation."42 Literary institutions, acaderrues, school syilabuses, the
canon-ail these things now having become instrUITlents of national
identity, the ide a of dividing up nationalliteratures on the exact model
of political units began to acquire a sort of natural appeal and, indeed,
inevitability. With the constitution of national literary pantheons and
the associated hagiography of great writers-now considered national
assets and symbols of inteilectual influence and power-the national or-
ganization ofliteratures became an essential feature ofliterary competi-
tion arnong nations.
Foilowing the Herderian revolution, then, ailliteratures had been de-
clared national, which is to say sealed off from each other behind na-
tional boundaries like so many rnonads that contain the principle of
their own causality. The national character of a literature was fixed in
terms of a series of traits declared to be peculiar to it. Moreover, now
that the nation was seen as the natural and unsurpassable horizon oflit-
erature, national literary histories were composed and taught in such a
way that they became closed in upon themselves, having nothing in
COITilnOn (or so it was supposed) with their neighbors. From. this came
the belief that national traditions are fundamentaily different. 43 Indeed,
their very periodizations rendered them incomparable and inCOITlrrlen-
surable: thus French literary history was imagined to unfold as a succes-
sion of centuries, while English historians rnade reference to the reigns

ofsovereigns (Elizabethan literature, Victorian literature, and so on), and
Spanish critics divided divided literary time into "generations" (the gen-
eration of 1898, for example, or the generation of 1927). The national-
ization of literary traditions therefore gave rise to the view that their
separation fiorn one another is a fact of nature.
By the sarne token, nationalization had tangible consequences for lit-
erary practice. Acquaintance with the texts of a particular national pan-
theon and knowledge of the rnajor dates of a country's nationalized lit-
erary history had the effect of transforming an artificial construction
into an object of shared learning and belief. Within the closed environ-
ment of the nation, the process of differentiation and essentialization
created farniliar and analyzable cultural distinctions: national peculiari-
ties were insisted upon and cultivated, chiefly through the schools, with
the result that references, citations, and allusions to the nationalliterary
past became the private property of native speakers. National peculiari-
ties. thus acquired a reality of their own, and helped in turn to pro duce a
literature that was consistent with accepted national categories.
Thus it was that in the course of the nineteenth century, even in the
most powerfulliterary worlds, which is to say the ones that were most
independent of national and political interests, literature came to be
redefined in national terrns. ln England, for exarnple, literature was
made the primary vehicle of "national self-definition."44 Stefan Collini
has analyzed the nationalization of culture in nineteenth-century Eng-
land through the lens of popular anthologies (in series su ch as the one
edited by John Morley for Macmillan in London, beginning in 1877,
under the title "English Men of Letters") as weil as of scholarly enter-
prises su ch as the famous Oxford English Dictionary, whose declared pur-
pose was to explain the "genius of the English language." Bringing out
the tautology implicit in these attempts to define a national literature,
Collini rernarks: "Only those authors who display the putative charac-
teristics are recognised as authentically English, a category whose defini~
tion relies upon the examples provided in the literature written by just
those authors."45
The literary nations that are most closed in upon themselves, most
concerned to equip themselves with an identity, endlessly reproduce
their own norms in a sort of closed circuit, declaring them national and
therefore necessary and sufficient within their own autarkic market.
Thus Japan, which was long absent from international literary space,

drew upon a very powelful internaI tradition, handed down from one
generation to another, that was based on a set of rnodels held not rnerely
to be a necessary part of any writer's training, but actually objects of na-
tional piety. This cultural context, inaccessible to most foreign readers
and extrernely difficult to cornrnunicate abroad, inevitably fàvored a na-
tional conception ofliterature.
By contrast with autonomous literary worlds, the most dosed literary
spaces are characterized by an absence of translation and, as a result, an
ignorance of recent innovations in international literature and of the
criteria of literary modernity. Juan Benet described the lack of interest
in translations of foreign works in postwar Spain in these terms:
Kafka's Metamorphosis had been translated just before the war, a very
slender volume that passed virtually unnoticed. But no one knew
Kafka's great novels; they could only be found in South American
editions. Proust was a bit better known thanks to the translation in
I 930-3 I of the first two volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu by the
great poet Pedro Salinas. 46 They enjoyed a great success, but the war,
which came very suddenly, prevented Proust from having any influ-
ence whatever. No one, or almost no one, had ever heard of Kafka,
Thomas Mann, Faulkner ... No [Spanish] writer had been influenced
by the great writers of the century, in poetry any more than in the
theater, the novel, or even the essay. It was almost impossible to know
these foreign works; they were not prohibited, but there simply was no
importation of books. Only Faulkner's Sanctuary, which had been
translated in I 935, but no one was interested in itY
This process ofliterary nationalization was so successful that not even

French literary space was untouched by it. The ernphasis placed upon
regional folklore and traditions in France, and the related interest shown
in linguistic and philological issues, were evidence of the growing influ-
ence of the German model. Michel Espagne has nonetheless been able
to show that this national conception ofliterature was reappropriated in
a very specifie way. The creation of university chairs of foreign literature
after 1830, for exarnple, illustra tes both the attraction of the theories im-
ported from Germany and the paradoxical character of this borrowing.
The tenn "national culture" was used in France at this time primarily to
describe foreign cultures: thus, in a striking reversaI, philology, instead of
serving as an instrument for pressing the daims to independence of var-
ious rediscovered nationalities, becarne an instrument of universalization
fiVc;rld Literary Space 1 I07

through the introduction of literatures that were little or not at ail
known in France, by rneans of academic essays, collections of popular
tales, and histories of Greek, Provençal, and Slavic national literatures.
Even if the ideas that inspired this work were to a large extent imported
from Gerrnany, France managed to place them in the service of its own
universalizing conception ofliterature. 48
NATIONAL VERSUS INTERNATIONAL WRITERS

As a consequence of the Herderian revolution, then, internationalliter--
ary space has come to be structured, and lastingly so, according to the
age and volume of its constituent literary resources and the relative de-
gree of autonorrlY enjoyed by each national space.World literary space is
now organized in terms of the opposition between, on the one hand, an
autonornous pole composed of those spaces that are most endowed in
literary resources, which serves as a model and a recourse for writers
claiming a position of independence in newly formed spaces (with the
result that Paris emerged as a "denationalized" universal capital and a
specific measure of literary time was established); and, on the other, a
heteronomous pole con1posed of relatively deprived literary spaces at
early stages of developrnent that are dependent on political-typically
national-authorities.
The internal configuration of each national space precisely mirrors
the structure of the international literary world as whole. Just as the
global space is organized with reference to a literary and cosmopolitan
pole, on the one side, and a political and national pole on the other, each
of its constituent spaces is structured by the rivalry between what 1 shall
cali "national" writers (who embody a national or popular definition
of literature) and "international" writers (who uphold an autonomous
conception of literature). 49 Since the position of each national space in
the world structure depends on its relative degree of autonomy, which in
turn is a function of its volume ofliterary capital, and so ultimately of its
age, the world ofletters must be conceived as a composite of the various
national literary spaces, which are thernselves bipolar and differentially
situated in the world structure according to the relative attraction ex-
erted upon therrl by its national and international poles, respectively.
This sirrlple structural analogy conceals a fundamental aspect of world
literary space. For it is with reference to the auto no mous pole of the
worldwide field that national spaces manage first to emerge, and then to
roS 1 THE WORLD REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

achieve autonOlTIY thernselves. The hornology between international lit-
eraly space and its cornponent national spaces is the product not ITlerely
of the very fonn of the worldwide field, but also of its progressive uni-
fication: new national spaces appear and subsequently are unified on the
rnodel of the central areas of their respective linguistic dOITlains, whose
consecrating authorities permit international writers within each space
to legitimize their position on the nationallevel. The international field
as a whole thus tends toward greater autonomy through the ernergence
of autonornous sub-poles in each national space.
In other words, the writers who seek greater freedom for their work
are those who know the laws of world literary space and who make use
of thern in trying to subvert the dOITlÎnant norms of their respective na-
tional fields. The autonomous pole of the world space is therefore essen-
tial to its very constitution, which is to say to its littérisation and its grad-
uaI denationalization: not only does the center supply theoretical and
aesthetic nl0dels to writers on the periphery; its publishing networks
and critical functions jointly strengthen the fabric of universalliterature.
There is nothing "nùraculous" about this tendency toward greater au-
tonOITly. Every work from a dispossessed national space that aspires to
the status of literature exists solely in relation to the consecrating au-
thorities of the rnost autonornous places. It is only the romantic image
of the artist's singularity-the fundamental eleITlent of literary mythol-
ogy-that sus tains the mistaken ide a of creative solitude. In reality, the
great heroes of literature invariably ernerge only in association with the
specific power of an autonomous and internationalliterary capital. The
case ofJames Joyce-rejected in Dublin, ignored in London, banned in
New York, lionized in Paris-is undoubtedly the best exainpie.
The literary world needs to be seen, then, as the product of antago-
nistic forces rather than as the result of a linear and gradually increas-
ing tendency to autonorny. Opposed to the centripetal forces that
strengthen the autonornous and unifying pole of world literary space
and provide both a comrnon measure of literary value and a literarily
absolute point of reference (the Greenwich meridian) are the centrifu-
gaI forces associated with the national poles of each national space-the
inertial forces that work to divide and particularize by essentializing dif-
ferences, reproducing outrnoded lTIodels, and nationalizing and COIT1-
ITlercializing literary life.
Consequently it becornes clear why the unification of international

space proceeds for the most part through rivalries within national fields
between national and international writers. As the space becornes more
unified, a system of structural oppositions takes shape: thus, in Spain,
Miguel Delibes and Camilio José Cela are to Juan Benet what, in the
former Yugoslavia, DraganJerernié is to Danilo Kis; what V. S. Naipaul is
to Salrnan Rushdie in India and England; what the Gruppe 47 is to
Arno Schmidt in postwar Germany; what Chinua Achebe is to Wole
Soyinka in Nigeria; and so on. By the same token, it bec ornes clear that
the dichotenues that structure the world space are the sanle ones that
oppose academics to formalists, ancients to moderns, regionalists to cos-
mopolitans, writers on the periphery to writers in the center. Larbaud
had sketched a rather similar typology (at a moment when the literary
world was virtually lirnited to Europe) in Reading, This Unpunished Vice:
"The European writer is one who is read by the elite of his country
and by the elites of other countries. Thornas Hardy, Marcel Proust,
Pirandello, etc., are European writers. Authors whose works are popular
in their native countries but which are not read by the elites of their
countries are ... let us say, national writers-an intermediate category
between European writers and local or dialect writers."50
For writers from nationalized spaces, exile is almost synonymous with
autonomy. The great literary revolutionaries-Kis, Michaux, Beckett,
and Joyce among them-find themselves so at odds with the norms of
their native literary space and, by contrast, so at home with the norms
current in the centers of international space that they are able to make
their way only outside their homeland. It is in this sense that the three
weapons that Joyce claimed as his own in A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man (I9I6) are to be understood. His character Stephen Dedalus
declares, in a well-known phrase, that he tries to live and to create as
"freely" and "wholly" as possible, "using for my defence the only arms 1
allow myself to use-silence, exile and cunning."51 Of the three, exile is
surely the major weapon of the writer who seeks to defend his auton-
only against attack at any cost.
ln order to understand what is at stake in the struggles that take place in

dorninated spaces between national writers--for whom literary aesthet-
ics (because they are connected with political questions) are necessarily
neonaturalistic-and international writers-cosmopolitans and poly-
glots who, owing to their knowledge of the revolutions that have taken
l IO 1 THE WORLD REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

place in the freest territories of the literary world, attempt to introduce
new norms-it will be helpful to look at two cases in particular: Spain
during the 1950S and 1960s and Yugoslavia during the 1970s.
Juan Benet (1927-1993) owed his rej ection of the canons of Spanish
literature to his awareness of their temporal and aesthetic anachronism:
"There was no conterrlporary Spanish literature," he explained. "AlI the
writers between 1900 and 1970, every la st one of them, wrote in the
manner of the generation of 1898, a naturalism adapted to the Spanish
style, to the Castilian tongue. This was a literature that was already ru-
ined; it already belonged to the past before being written."52 At the end
of the 1950S, Benet by himself occupied the first and only international
position in Spanish literary space, then dominated and controiled by the
dictatorship of General Francisco Franco. On the basis of a single model,
the American novel-especially Faulkner, whom he discovered in issues
of Les Temps Modernes that reached him by clandestine means 53-Benet
singlehandedly revolutionized the Spanish novel, and this in a literary
territory totaily closed off from news of international innovation.
The political and inteilectual isolation of Francoist Spain was at once
active and passive (that is, decided on the nationallevel and experienced
on the international level) , reinforcing local habits. 54 The civil war
Inarked a profound and radical break in the history of Spanish letters.
The movements begun by the avant-gardes of the 1910S and 1920S, and
then carried on by the generation of 1927, were abruptly ended; the in-
teilectual class was destroyed; and the practice ofliterature in Spain, even
before the censorship of the 1940S and 1950S, was considerably weak-
ened and impoverished. Benet, who came to Madrid in the 1950S, later
recailed the political dependency of the literary landscape he found
there. The obligatory and unchailenged realism, concerned solely with
the world inside the country's borders, was perfectly consistent with an
earlier tradition of the novel: "It was above ail the literary mediocrity of
ail the Spanish novelists that made me angry ... What 1 couldn't stand is
that they copied Spanish reality using the methods, the system, the style
of the great tradition of the naturalistic novel."55 This functionalist and
realist aesthetic is, as we have seen, one of the most teiling measures of
the political dependence of a literary space. Spain-a country whose lit-
erary and political history had virtuaily been arrested-stood out as one
of the most conservative and least autonomous spaces in ail of Europe,
oblivious to the literary upheavals taking place around it.
fiVorld Literary Space 1 III

In this frozen landscape, Benet boldly broke with national preoccupa-
tions and proclaimed the necessity of a literature that had to cross politi-
cal borders in order to be genuinely contemporary. His exceptional and
clandestine knowledge of what was being published in Paris allowed
him to be open to literary innovation throughout the world: "1 received
all of Monsieur Coindreau's translations with Gallirnard, and this is how
1 came to read Faulkner, in French translation. France was very, very im-
portant-everything carne from there. 1 received Les Temps Modernes a
month after it came out. 1 still have at horne an entire set of issues from
1945 to 1952. This was where 1 discovered the Arnerican crirne novel,
for example."56
The lTIodel and, above all, the diffusion of consecrated texts makes
possible the appearance of an auto no mous (albeit sometirnes clandes-
tine) pole. For a man such as Benet, who in the years following the Sec-
ondWorldWar found himself in an almost experimental situation of
ct;tltural isolation (or at least who thought of his situation in this way)
and who yet managed to learn of the upheavals in literary aesthetics and
novelistic technique that were taking place elsewhere in Europe and in
the United States, the model of an internationalliterature furnished the
instrunlents he needed in order to challenge the dominant body ofliter-
ary and asthetic practices in his homeland. The Spanish case illustra tes
the link between stylistic conservatism and national traditions, on the
one hand, and literary innovation and international culture on the other.
Benet's determination to write according to the norrns that were
then in force along the literary Greenwich meridian but unknown in
Spain, a country subject to severe political censorship, required unprece-
dented courage and condemned him to complete neglect during the
time it took for the national space-whose contours little by little he
succeeded in profoundly modifying by his very presence-to overcorTIe
its backwardness and grasp the nature and scope of the revolution he
had brought about. It was to be another ten or fifteen years before an-
other generation was ready to take over and able to recognize him as
one of the great writers of Spanish modernity. This chronological soli-
tude, which isolated him from the other writers of his generation and
prevented him frorn forrning any group or school, strengthened his be-
lief in the irnportance of literary freedom-a freedom that had been
achieved in the face of resistance on all sides-and in the necessity of an
ethics that was at once political and aesthetic:
l I2 1 THE WORLO REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

l believe that l brought about a "moral" rupture with the literature
that formerly was written in this country. Young novelists such as
Javier Marias, Felix de Azua, Soledad Puértolas are much better edu-
cated than the previous generation was; like me, they have very little
respect for traditional Spanish literature. They learned their craft by
reading English, French, Ameriean, and Russian writers . . . and, like
me, they broke with tradition. It was not a question ofhaughtiness, but
rather of respecting a certain type of conduet, an ethics. 57
Before this, subversion in Spain-so far as it existed at ail under Franco's

dictatorship-was exclusively political.What Benet did was to intro-
duce a law of literary independence, championing the primacy of form
and access to international rnodels against the suffocating regulation of
literary creativity by an authoritarian regime.
In much the same way, Danilo Kis (1935-I989) proclaimed the right to
literary independence in Yugoslavia. In a literary manifesto published in
Belgrade under the tide Cas anatomije (The Anatomy Lesson, I978), he
dissected the literature of his homeland and announced his intention to
bring about a "permanent shift (in both farm and content) vis,-à-vis our
run-of-the-millliterary production," to introduce a "distance that may
not guarantee a work absolute or even relative superiority ... but [will]
at least guarantee it modernity, that is, save it frorn anachronism ... If 1
have applied my experience with the modern European and American
novel to Iny own works ... it is because 1 want ... to do away with can-
ons and anachronisms in at least the literature of my own country."58 In
adopting the "European and American novel" as an aesthetic norm, Kis
broke with the "anachronistic" literary practices of his country and ap-
pealed to the international present. Thus he described his own narrative
technique as a way of avoiding "the original sin of the realist novel-
psychological motivation frorn a divine point of view; a motivation that,
through the platitudes and banalities it engenders, still wreaks havoc
with the novel and short story among us [in Yugoslavia] and yet, with its
trite, anachronistic solutions and its 'déja vu' quality, arouses the admira-
tion of our critics."59
Kifs situation in Yugoslavia during the I970S was exactly the sarne as
Benet's in Spain ten or twenty years earlier: trapped in a country whose
literature was exclusively concerned with national and political ques-
tions, and in an intellectual rnilieu that was (as he put it) "ignorant" be-
World Literary Space 1 II 3

cause "provincial,"60 he nonetheless managed to revise the rules of the
game and forge a new fictional aesthetic by arming himself with the
results of the literary revolutions that had occurred previously on the in-
ternationallevel. But the rupture that he brought about can only be un-
derstood in terms of the national world in opposition to which he con-
structed his identity as a writer. The Anatomy Lesson is a rneticulous
description of the Yugoslav literary space of the period, written in re-
sponse to charges of plagiarislTI leveled against his novel Grobnica za
Borisa Davidoviéa (A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, l 976). At the time Kis
was one of the most famous writers in Yugoslavia, one of the few ofhis
generation to be really recognized outside its borders, envied and at the
same time n1arginal, a resolutely antinationalist and cosmopolitan figure
in a country that was divided and withdrawn into itself. His work, trans-
lated already into severallanguages, was beginning to make its way into
a wider world. In short, everything conspired to put hinl at odds with
the national intellectuals ofhis country.
The accusation of plagiarism brought against him was credible only
in a closed literary world that had not yet been touched by any of the
great literary, aesthetic, and fonnal revolutions of the twentieth century.
Only in a world that was unaware of "Western" literary innovations (an
epithet that invariably carried a pejorative sense in Belgrade) could a
text composed with the whole of international fictional modernity in
mind be seen as siInple copy of sorne other work. The very accusation
of plagiarisnl was proof, in fact, of the aesthetic backwardness ofSerbia, a
land located far in the literary past in relation to the Greenwich merid-
ian. What Kis called "folk kitsch," "petit-bourgeois kitsch," and "pretti-
ness" are aspects of the conformist practice of a literary space so corn-
pletely closed in on itself that it knows only how to reproduce ad
infinitum the neorealist conception of the novel.
The harsh critique of nationalism that opens The Anatomy Lesson not
only is political in the narrow sense of the term; it is also a way of politi-
cally defending a position ofliterary autonorny, a refusaI to recognize the
aesthetic canons irnposed by the nationalist mind. "The nationalist," Kis
writes, "is by definition an ignoramus."61 He is in any case (to recall
Benet's characterization) an academic, a stylistic conservative, since he
knows nothing other than his national tradition. KiS's "permanent shift"
away from nationalism, the "diiferential coifficient [of his writing] in rela-
tion to the canonized works of [Serbian] literature," explains in part the

very fOrITl ofhis work: 62 in the chronically anachronistic literary space of
the former Yugoslavia, Kis sought to create the conditions for an auton-
omous literature by reference to international practice.
FORMS OF LlTERARY DOMINATION

In the literary world, dornination is not exerted in an unequivocal way.
Because hierarchical structure is not linear, it cannot be described in
terms of a sirnple model of a single centralized dominant power. Ifliter-
ary space is relatively autonomous, it is also by the same token relatively
dependent on political space. This fundamental dependency assumes a
variety of forms, particularly political ones, and operates in a variety of
ways, most notably through language.
Here we encounter once again the ambiguity and paradox that gov-
ern the very enterprise of literature itself: since language is not a purely
literary tool, but an inescapably political instrument as weIl, it is through
language that the literary world remains subject to political power. One
consequence of this is that forms of domination, which are interlocking
and often superirrlposed upon one another, are apt to merge and be-
come hidden. Thus literarily dominated spaces may also be dominated
linguistically and politically: especially in countries that have undergone
colonization, the fact that political domination is often exerted by lin-
guistic means implies a condition of literary dependency. Indeed, when
the sources of dependency are exclusively linguistic (and cultural)-as,
for exalnple, in the cases of Belgium, Austria, and Switzerland---literary
dOITunation is unavoidable. But it may also be the case that domination
is exerted and measured in literary terms alone. These include the effec--
tiveness of consecration by central authorities, the power of critical de-
crees, the canonizing effect of prefàces and translations by writers who
themselves have been consecrated at the center (thus Gide introduced
the Egyptian Taha Hussein and translated Rabindranath Tagore, while
Marguerite Yourcenar introduced the work of the ]apanese novelist
Yukio Mishima to France),63 the prestige of the collections in which
foreign works appear, and the leading role played by great translators.
Since aIl these forms of domination are liable to become mixed to-
gether, and so obscure each other, one of the objects of the present work
is to isolate and describe thern, while also showing that the literary bal-
ance of power is often a disguised reflection of patterns of political dom-
ination. Conversely, however, it is also necessary to show that patterns of
fiVorld Literary Space 1 1 15

literary domination cannot be reduced to a political balance of power, as
is sometimes done by academic critics who treat perceived differences in
rank between national literatures as a simple function of economic
domination, analyzed in ter ms of a binary opposition between center
and periphery. This sort of spatialization tends to neutralize the violence
that actually governs the literary world and to obscure the inequali-
ties that arise from strictly literary competition between donùnant and
dominated. A purely political analysis does not allow us to understand
the individu al struggles waged by writers in dorninated spaces against
the center or against regional centers associated with different linguistic
areas, much less the precise nature ofliterary reality and aesthetics.
A more sophisticated model would take into account a peculiar am-
biguity of the relation of literary domination and dependence, namely,
that writers in dominated spa ces nlay be able to convert their depen-
dence into an instrument of emancipation and legitimacy. To criticize
established literary forms and genres because they have been inherited
from colonial culture, for instance, nùsses the point that literature itself,
as a value common to an entire space, is not only part of the legacy of
political domination but also an instrument that, once reappropriated,
perrnits writers frorn literarily deprived terri tories to gain recognition. 64
Literary Regions and Linguistic Areas

Linguistic areas are the emanation and embodiment of political domina-
tion. By exporting their languages and institutions, colonizing nations
(which is to say dorninant literary nations) succeeded in strengthening
their political pole. The expansion of linguistic (or linguistic-cultural)
areas therefore constituted a sort of extension of European national lit-
erary spaces. Afterward, as SaIrnan Rushdie put it, the "pink conquerors
crept home, the boxwallahs and memsahibs and bwanas, leaving be-
hind them parliaments, schools, Grand Trunk Roads and the rules of
cricket."65 The age of colonialism was characterized in large part by a
process oflinguistic and cultural unification. One of the chief aspects of
this "propensity for self-exportation," as the West lndian poet Édouard
Glissant has noted, is that it typically generated "a sort of vocation for
the universal," with the result that the greatWestern languages carne to
be regarded as "vehicular languages" that "often took the place of an ac-
tual metropolis."66
Each linguistic territory has a center that controls and attracts the lit-
rr6 1 THE WORlD REPUBLIC OF lETTERS

erary productions dependent on it. London today, even if it now finds it-
self in cornpetition with New York and Toronto, continues to be central
for Australians, New Zealanders, Irish, Canadians, Indians, and English-
speaking Africans; Barcelona, the intellectual and cultural capital of
Spain, rernains a great literary center for Latin Americans; Paris is still
central for writers frorn West and North Africa as well as for Franco-
phone authors in Belgiurn, Switzerland, and Canada, countries where it
continues to exercise influence by virtue of its literary erninence rather
than any power of political contInl. Berlin is the leading capital for Aus-
trian and Swiss writers and rernains an important literary center today
for the countries of northenl Europe as weil as for the countries of cen-
tral Europe that emerged from the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire.
Each of these linguistic-cultural areas preserves a large measure of au-
tonomy in relation to the others: each is what might be cailed a "litera-
ture-world" (to transpose Braudel's notion of an "economy-world"):
that is, a hornogenous and autononl0US sphere in which the legitimacy
of its centralized power of consecration is unchallenged; a world having
its own pantheon and prizes, its own favored genres, its own distinctive
traditions and internaI rivalries. The structure of each area mirrors that
of worldwide literary space, with a subtle hierarchy being established
among its various satellites as a function of their symbolic distance
(which is aesthetic rather than geographic) from the center. In sorne re-
gions there may be more than one center-London and New York, for
example, within the Anglophone area. These capitals come into conflict
with each other, each one seeking to impose its authority over the
shared linguistic hinterland with a view to achieving, and then sus tain-
ing, a regional monopoly ofliterary consecration.
In the aftermath of decolonization, then, the Inajor literary centers
have been able to go on maintaining a sort of literary protectorate
thanks to the dual character of their languages, which ailows them to ex-
ert a literary form of political power. Even in the "soft" neocolonial
fonn of language and literature, the perpetuation of such domination is
a powerful factor favoring consolidation of the heteronornous (or politi-
cal and econorrnc) pole of the worldwide literary field.
London is, of course, along with Paris, the other great capital of world
literature, not only by virtue of its accumulated literary capital but also

owing to the imrnensity of its former colonial empire. Its power of rec-
ognition, which extends frorn Ireland to India, Africa, and Australia, is
unquestionably one of the greatest in the world: authors as different as
Shaw, Yeats, Tagore, Narayan, and Soyinka (four of thern Nobel Prize
winners) have alllooked to London as their literary capital. This power,
and the correspondingly large share ofliterary credit it irnplies, continue
to confer realliterary legitimacy upon writers from Cornrnonwealth na-
tions, successors to the terri tories of the old empire. Among writers of
Indian descent, for exarnple, no matter whether they have wholly assirn-
ilated British values, as in the case of V S. Naipaul, or whether they pre-
fer to keep a critical distance from thern, as in the case of Salman
Rushdie, consecration by London has allowed them to enjoy literary
existence on the internationallevel, even if this forrn of ennoblernent is
not altogether untouched by political motives.
Of one of the heroes in The Satanic Verses, Saladin Charncha, an In-
dian immigrant to London, Rushdie writes:
Of the things of the mind, he had most loved the protean, inexhaust-
ible culture of the Enghsh-speaking peoples; had said, when courting
Pamela, that Othello, "just that one play," was worth the total output of
any other dramatist in any other language, and though he was con-
scious ofhyperbole, he didn't think the exaggeration very great ... Of
material things, he had given his love to this city, London, preferring it
to the city of his birth or to any other; had been creeping up on it,
stealthily, with mounting excitement, freezing into a statue when it
looked in his direction, dreaming ofbeing the one to possess it and so,
in a sense, become it, as when in the game of grandmother's footsteps
the child who touches the one who's it ("on it", today's young Lon-
doners would say) takes over the cherished identity . . . [London's]
long history as a refuge, a role it maintained in spite of the recalcitrant
ingratitude of the refugees' children; and without any of the self-con-
gratulatory huddled-masses rhetoric of the "nation of immigrants"
across the ocean, itself far from perfectly open-armed. Would the
United States, with its are-you-now-have-you-ever-beens, have per-
mitted Ho Chi Minh to cook in its hotel kitchens? What would its
McCarran-Walter Act have to say about a latter-day Karl Marx, stand-
ing bushy--bearded at its gates, waiting to cross its yellow hnes? 0
Proper London! Dull would he truly be of soul who did not prefer its
faded splendours, its new hesitancies, to the hot certainties of that
transatlantic New Rome. 67
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London's power of attraction, it will be noted, shares two characteristics
already observed in connection with Paris: a sizable sture ofliterary cap-
ital and a reputation for politicalliberalisrn.
By virtue of its uncontested political power, London has very often
been used as a weapon in the permanent struggle that opposes European
capitals to each other. When France's cultural domination was at its
height, at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth
centuries, its competitors sought to turn London's prestige against Paris.
Between 1750 and 1770 in Germany, for example, when a national liter-
ature was in the process ofbeing created, the "preclassical" generation-·
that of Klopstock and especially of Lessing-proposed to put an end to
the imitation (and therefore to the domination) of French authors by re-
lying on English lllOdels. Lessing himself was responsible for the great
shift in critical and popular opinion regarding the work of Shakespeare.
But London has seldonl imposed itself outside the linguistic jurisdic-
tion of the British Eillpire (now Commonwealth). London publishers
today publish very few literary translations, and prizes are awarded only
to works written in English. 68 It owes its credit to the vast extent of its
linguistic area and to the globally dorninant position now enjoyed by
the English language; but because its power of consecration has always
had a linguistic (and therefore often political) basis, its strictly literary
credit is not of the same kind as that commanded by Paris.
In recent years the rivalry between London and New York has pro-
duced a very clear bipolarization ofEnglish-speaking cultural space. But
if New York today is the unchallenged publishing capital of the world in
financial terms, still it cannot be said to have becorne a center of conse-
cration whose legitinlacy is universally recognized. Here again the very
question of legitinlacy is one of the things at stake in the game, and the
way it is answered depends on the place occupied by those who are pre-
pared to wager on it. Many writers take advantage of this uncertain bal-
ance of power in order to play one capital off against the other.
The Postcolonial Novel

In exporting their languages, European nations have also exported their
own political struggles; or rather, the work of writers from outlying
lands has becorne a major element in these struggles. Increasingly it is
the case that the literary power of a central nation can be measured in
terms of the literary innovations produced by universally recognized
World Literary Space 1 l 19

writers fmrn its suburbs. For a language no less than for the literary tra-
dition associated with it, these outsiders supply a new way ofkeeping up
with modernity and thereby of revaluing the nation's stock of literary
capital. The irnportance of notions such as "Cornrnonwealth literature"
or "francophonie" lies in precisely this, for they make it possible to lay
claim to, and then annex, peripheralliterary innovations under a central
linguistic and cultural aegis.
Since I98I, for example, the Booker Prize, the rnost prestigious liter-
ary prize in Great Britain, has on several occasions been awarded to "not
quites," as the Indian writer Bharati Mukherjee cails thern-authors
whose work has been shaped by irnrnigration, exile, or postcolonization.
The tirst of these to be crowned was Salman Rushdie, for Midnight's
Children (I98I). Subsequently the prize has gone to Keri Hulme, a
Maori frOIn New Zealand; Ben Okri, a Nigerian; Michael Ondaatje, a
Canadian citizen of Sinhalese birth; and Kazuo Ishiguro, a naturalized
Englishman born in japan. Two Australians, a South African, and several
finalists of non-English ancestry profited from critical attention as weil,
among thetn Timothy Mo, a Hong Kong Chinese by birth. This was ail
that was needed for the critics, confusing cause and effect, to deduce the
existence of a "new" literature, even of a veritable literary movement
originating in the fonner British colonial empire.
In fact, there was a desire on the part of publishers to create the im-
pression of a group by gathering together under a single label authors
who had nothing, or very little, in common. This labeling effect (which
tnay be compared, for example, with the prornotion of the Latin Ameri-
can "boorn" of the I960s) turned out to be an extrernely effective mar-
keting strategy. Ishiguro, whose parents had ernigrated from japan when
he was a child, was unaffected by colonization and had an entirely differ-
ent relationship to England frorn an Indian such as Rushdie. Ben Okri
was Nigerian, like Wole Soyinka; but Soyinka, despite the international
recognition that led to the Nobel Prize, had never been regarded as a
neocolonial author-no more than V. S. Naipaul, a Trinidadian who
practiced a stubborn assirnilationism and was knighted by the queen.
Michael Ondaatje, for his part, professed to be interested in "interna-
tional bastards, born in one place and deciding to live in another."69 And
Rushdie himself, who in various articles published after the success of
Midnight's Children refused to be treated as a postimperial product, was
one of the first to repudiate the geopolitical assunlptions of the new

British taxonomy. "At best," he wrote in 1983, "what is called 'Com-
rnonwealth literature' is positioned below English literature 'proper'-
. . . it places Eng. Lit. at the centre and the rest of the world at the pe-
riphery."7o By ignoring this ambiguity British critics were able to point
ta the successful assimilation of which these writers were manifest
proo( and the extraordinary extent of the territory over which such as-
similation occurred, as evidence of the power and the influence ofBrit-
ish civilization. To rally so rnany disparate writers (Nigerians, Sri Lan-
kans, Canadians, Pakistanis, Anglo-Indians, even ]apanese) under the
British banner was a curious yet clever way of incorporating as part of
official British literary history works that to one degree or another were
written against it.
What is more, national literary awards-such as the Goncourt and
Booker Prizes-were now often influenced by comnlercial success,
with the result that the verdicts ofjuries tended more and more to coin-
cide with the interests of publishers. And by extending the jurisdiction
of the judges to include the work of authors from the former colonial
empire (whether in the name of Commonwealth literature or franco-
phonie or sorne other conception), their deliberations suffered a further
loss of independence, being subject not only to national norms and
commercial criteria but now to neoimperial ambitions as weIl.
The vogue for exoticism was so great that publishers-particularly in
the United States-moved quickly to rnanufacture bestsellers for an in-
ternational public. The programmed success of the novel by the Indian
writer Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy (1993), perfectly illustrates this phe-
nornenon. Critics in both England and France described the book as an
indubitable sign of the revitalization of literature in English, even of the
"revenge" of the old colonies against the British Empire-and this de-
spite the fact that the literary techniques employed were both typi-
cally English and largely outmoded. Indeed, the publisher proudly an-
nounced that the book was set in India in the I950S and written "in the
great tradition of]ane Austen and Dickens." ln adopting the perennially
popular form of the farnily saga and enlisting the aesthetic norms of the
past century in the service of an eminently Western view of the world,
the author (a graduate of Oxford and Stanford) showed his eagerness to
satisfY aIl the most obvious criteria of the commercially successful novel.
Far from furnishing evidence of sorne sort ofliterary liberation, or of the
sudden acce~sion of the formerly colonized to literary greatness, A Suit-

able Boy offered irrefütable proof of the virtually total domination of the
English literary model over its cultural area.
Unlike London, the scope of whose cultural jurisdiction depended
mainly on its stock of literary capital and the extent of its linguistic ter-
ritory, Paris never took an interest in writers from its colonial territories;
or, rnore precisely, it long despised and rnistreated thern as a species of
extreme provincials, too sirnilar to be celebrated as exotic foreigners but
too remote to be considered worthy of interest. France has no tradition
of cultural consecration on purely linguistic grounds, and what is called
francophonie is only a tirnid political substitute for the influence that Paris
once exerted (and to some extent still exerts today) in symbolic terms.
lndeed, the few nationalliterary prizes that have been awarded to writ-
ers from the former French colonies or fr0111. the margins of the Franco-
phone area have been motivated by transparendy neoirnperial consider-
ations.
In polycentric areas, dominated writers can exploit an unequal balance

of power between linguistic and political capitals. Where there is con1-
petition between two capitals-between London and New York, for
example, or between Lisbon and Sao Paulo-peripheral literary spaces
are subject to a dual form of domination, which paradoxically permits
writers to make use of one center in order to do batde with the other.
Thus in Canada writers can choose between adopting the critical cate-
gories of their neighbor to the south-as in the case of Michael
Ondaatje, a native of Sri Lanka who lives in Toronto-or, conversely, re-
lying on London in order to escape the homogenizing and dissipating
influence of Arnerican norms. This is the case, for example, with the
novelists Margaret Atwood and Jane Urquhart, who seek to found an
Anglo-Canadian literary identity on the basis of the dichotemy between
the British and American traditions that characterizes their nation's
literature. "The history of Canada," Atwood observes, "is in part the
history of a struggle against the United States. Many Canadians were
political refugees who refused to give Up."71 In The VVhirlpool (1986),
Urquhart recreated the birth of the Canadian nation and literature by
imagining the encounter in 1889 of a historian and a poet at Niagara
Falls, astride the American-Canadian border. This place, the site of the
batde of Lundy's Lane in 18 l 2, is thus made the syrnbol of the founding
of a nation, which is to say of a national reappropriation ofhistory:72 the

historian atternpts to demonstrate, as against both the official British
and Arnerican versions, that this batde was really a Canadian victory
("Irnagine having a victory stolen frorn you like that. The Americans are
robbing us of our victories! It's unconscionable! ... Total victory! They
never lost a batde, a skirrnish, a cockfight! Arrogant bastards!"); the
young poet, for his part, hesitates between the view of the world that
had been transrnitted to hirn by English romanticism ("'You're never
going to find Wordsworth's dafiodils here"') and the novelty of the
North American landscape. 73
One cannot really grasp Urquhart's purpose if one ignores this desire
to found a nation, inherent in every work produced in a dorninated
literary space. The difficult situation of double-edged dependence in
which Canadian writers find themselves therefore leads them to pit one
capital against the other. In the cases ofUrquhart and Atwood, the habit
of refèrring to English literary history, to the pantheon of British poetry
and fiction, helps strengthen the British pole, which is part of their his-
tory as Canadians and furnishes them with a supply of established liter·-
ary capital with which to oppose the rising power of the Americans. But
other deprived members of the English-speaking area of international
literary space choose to ally themselves with New York as a way of re-
sisting dependence on London. This is the case with Irish writers today,
who in their struggle against neoinlperial influence seek to take advan-
tage of the growing literary power (particularly in acadernic circles) of
the United States. The presence of a sizable Irish community that plays a
role in both American political and intellectuallife further improves the
possibility of shifting the balance ofliterary power away from London.
Sirnilarly, international recognition of the distinctive character ofBra-
zilian letters has now made it possible for writers in other parts of
the Portuguese-speaking area, less endowed in cultural and literary re-
sources, to look to the Sào Paulo pole in attempting to overturn tradi-
tional political and literary norms. Ail those in Portuguese-speaking Af-
rica today who seek to attain literary modernity and autonomy by
opposing the influence of Lisbon invoke the example of Brazilian po-
etry and, more generally, the Brazilian challenge to the linguistic--and
therefore cultural~constraints of classical Portuguese. Thus the Ango-
lan writer José Luandino Vieira (who is Portuguese by birth) and, more
recendy, the Mozambican writer Mia Couto have been able to rely
upon Brazilian literary resources in order to counteract the influence of
WorZd Literary Space 1 12 3

European rnodels and to create their own literary genealogy and his-
tory:74 "The poets of Mozambique," Couto has said, "are working above
ail to bring about the transformation of Portuguese. The most irnpor-
tant poets for us in Mozambique are the Brazilians, because they were in
a sense authorized to do violence to the language. People like Drum-
rnond de Andrade, Mario de Andrade, Guimades Rosa, Graciliano
Rarnos, and many others succeeded in renewing Portuguese."75 Real-
izing that they can draw not only upon the literary assets accurnulated
by the Brazilians since the 1920S but also upon the reserve of solutions
to the problern of overcoming inteilectual submission to Portugal that
have already been devised, Mozambican and Angolan writers have taken
up the banner ofliterary liberation in their turn while making a point of
acknowledging their dependence on Brazil, which had been in the same
position before them and yet rnanaged to create a distinctive and origi-
nal nationalliterature.
The- position of Francophone writers, on the other hand, is paradoxical

if not tragic as weil. Since for them Paris is not Inerely the capital of
world literary space, as historicaily it has been for writers everywhere,
but also the very source of the political and/or literary domination un-
der which they labor, they alone have been unable to look to Paris as a
second homeland. The possibility is not available to thenl of escaping
Paris-unless by retreating into their national space, as Ramuz did-or
of using Paris to invent a form of aesthetic dissidence. Making matters
worse, the power of Paris is still more dOlnineering and more keenly felt
by Francophone writers for being incessantly denied in the narne of the
univers al belief in the universality of French letters and on behalf of the
values of liberty promoted and monopolized by France itself. How can
one hope to found a new literary tradition that wiil be free from the in-
fluence of the world's nlost prestigious literature? No other center, no
other capital or authority, can reaily offer a way out fronl this impasse.
Still, the problern rnay not be intractable. Anl0ng the solutions that
have been proposed by intellectuals on the periphery of the French-
speaking world is the acrobatie theory known as the "two Frances." For
a long time the belief in a supposed duality-"the colonizing, reaction-
ary, racist France and the noble, generous France, mother of arts and let-
ters, the ernancipating creator of the rights of nlan and the citizen," as
Raphaël Confiant put it7 6-permitted Francophone writers to preserve
124 1 THE WORLD REPUBLIC OF lETTERS

a sense of freedom and cultivate the special identity necessary to their
literary existence while at the same tirne fighting against political subju-
gation. In recent years, however, a number of writers have adopted rnore
sophisticated strategies. Some, such as the West lndian writers Édouard
Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau (along with Confiant) and the Alge-
rian Rachid Boudjedra, have embraced the Faulknerian model in the
hope of escaping French supremacy; others, such as the Guinean writer
Tierno Monénernbo, explicitly de clare their indebtedness to the Latin
Americans-notably Octavio Paz-in their quest for creative liberty. 77
But in doing this they have only made a detour: Faulkner, like the
great writers of Latin America, was consecrated in Paris. To acknowl-
edge their example amounts still to recognizing the singular power of
Paris that continues to make itself felt throughout the world republic of
letters.
VVOrld Literary Space 1 125

4 1 The Pabric of the Universal
It is therefore wholly necessary that this man, if he values being illustrious, bring to the cap-
ital his bundle of talent, that there he lay it out before the Parisian experts, that he pay for
expertise, and that a reputation is then made for him that from the capital is dispatched to
the provinces, where it is eagerly accepted.
-Rodolphe Topffer, unpublished notes, 1834-1836
Yet up to the day of the occupation, Paris had been the Holy Place of our time. The only one.
Not because of its affirmative genius alone, but perhaps, on the contrary, through its passiv-
ity, which allowed it to be possessed by the searchers of every nation. By Picasso and Juan
Gris, Spaniards; by Modigliani, Boccioni and Severini, Italians; by Brancusi, Roumanian; by
Joyce, Irishman; by Mondrian, Dutchman; by Lipchitz, Polish Lithuanian; by Archipenko,
Kandinsky, Diaghilev, Larionov, Russians; by Calder, Pound, Gertrude Stein, Man Ray, Ameri-
cans; by Kupka, Czechoslovak; by Lehmbruck and Max Ernst, Germans; by Wyndham Lewis
and T. E. Hulme, Englishmen ... by ail artists, students, refugees ... Paris represented the In-
ternational of Culture ... [r]eleased in this aged and bottomless metropolis from national
folklore, national politics, national careers; detached from the family and the corporate taste.
-Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New
CONSECRATION, IN THE form of recognition by autonomous critics, sig-

nifies the crossing of a literary border. To cross this invisible line is to un-
dergo a sort of transformation-one might almost say a transmutation in
the alchemical sense. The consecration of a text is the almost rnagical
metamorphosis of an ordinary material into "gold," into absolute liter-
ary value. In this sense the sanctioning authorities of world literary space
are the guardians, guarantors, and creators of value, which is nonetheless
always changing, ceaselessly contested and debated, by virtue of the very
fact of its connection with the literary present and rnodernity. Valéry
justified the reference to value, it will be recalled, on the ground that "it
involves appreciation and judgments of irnportance, as well as discussion
of the price one is prepared to pay for this value," noting that "one can
see how it continually cornes into cornpetition with other values."l For
texts that corne from literarily disinherited countries, the rnagical trans-
mutation that consecration brings about amounts to a change in their
very nature: a passage from literary inexistence to existence, from invisi-
bility to the condition of literature-a transformation that 1 have cailed
littérisation.
THE CAPITAL AND ITS DOUBLE

Paris is not only the capital of the literary world. It is also, as a result, the
gateway to the "world market of intellectual goods," as Goethe put it;
the chief place of consecration in the world of literature. Consecration
in Paris is indispensable for authors frorn ail dorninated literary spaces:
translations, critical studies, tributes, and commentaries represent so
many judgments and verdicts that confer value upon a text that until
now has rernained outside world literary space or otherwise gone un-
noticed within. Because this judgment is pronounced by autonomous
literary authorities, it has real consequences for the reception of a text.
The belief in the power of the capital of the arts is so strong that not only
do artists throughout the world unreservedly accept the preerninence of
Paris; owing to the extraordinary concentration of intellectual talent
there that follows from this belief, Paris has become the place where
books-subrnitted to critical judgment and transmuted-can be dena-
tionalized and their authors made universal. By virtue of its status as the
central bank ofliterature, to revert to the terrns employed earlier, Paris is
able to create literary value and extend ternlS of credit everywhere in
the world.
SalTIuel Beckett, in an essay titled "La peinture des Van Velde; ou Le
Monde et le pantalon" (The Painting of the Van Velde Brothers; or The
World and the Trousers, 1945), expressed the obviousness of this power
of consecration in a single sentence: "The painting . . . of Abraham
and Gerardus van Velde is little known in Paris, which is to say little
The Pabric afthe Universal 1 I27

known."2 Paris-which Beckett had decided sorne years earlier, when
he was hinlself perfectly unknown, to make his horne-inspired, pro-
duced, and crowned works that were totally impossible and ignored
elsewhere. Having fl.ed Dublin to escape the establishment of a national
art under the political and religious supervision and censorship of the
new Irish state, Beckett spoke from personal experience: Paris was, frOln
his point of view, the capital of Art in the purest sense. He chose exile
there in order to affirm, as against the clairns of an art subjugated to na-
tional purposes, the total autononlY of literature.
Larbaud had argued in sin1Ïlar ternls, in an article written in the
192os, that WaltWhitman was unknown in America: "Yes, he was an
Anlerican ... But he was not an Arrlerican because he proclaüned him-
self the poet of America. Again the irmnediate rejection: he was as ne-
glected in the United States as Stendhal in Grenoble, or Cézanne in Aix
... rrlOst of 'the happy few' lived in Europe. It was therefore in Europe
alone that he could be recognized and that he was recognized."3 And, as
Pa ut de Man has pointed out, it was in France that the Argentine Jorge
Luis Borges was discovered by cri tics and regularly translated, although
he had been a great translator of American poetry and fiction into
Spanish. 4
James Joyce, rejected and even banned in Dublin, was welcomed and
consecrated by Paris, which rnade him an artist who revolutionized uni-
versaI literature rather than merely an Irish national writer. To escape
the linguistic, political, and rnoral (or religious) constraints of Irish liter-
ary space,Joyce devised a paradoxical and apparently contradictory solu-
tion by composing an Irish work-Ulysses-as an avowed exile from his
native land. Thus Larbaud, whose translation established Joyce as one of
the greatest writers of the century, managed to rescue hinl from an in-
visible provincialism and to universalize him, which is to say to give him
an existence in the autonomous literary sphere (like Yeats before hirn,
only more broadly, since Joyce was consecrated outside the cultural area
of the English language) but also to make hirn visible, accepted, and ac-
ceptable in his own national literary space. It was in this sense that
Larbaud wrote in 1921:
It must be remarked that in writing Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist, and

Ulysses, Uoyce] has do ne as much as ail the heroes of Irish nationalism
to win Ireland the respect of inteIlectuals everywhere. His work gives

back to Ireland, or rather gives to the young Ireland, an artistic physi-
ognomy, an intellectual identity; it does for Ireland what Ibsen's work
did in its time for Norway, what Strindberg's did for Sweden, what
Nietzsche's did for Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, and
what the books of Gabriel Miro and Ramon Gomez de la Serna have
just done for contemporary Spain ... In short, it may be said that with
the work ofJarnes Joyce, and in particular with Ulysses, which is soon
to appear in Paris, Ireland makes a sensational entry into the first rank
of European literature. 5
Sixty years later another exile crowned by Paris, Danilo Kis, described
in quite simple and intuitive terms the rnechanisms (of which he had
firsthand experience) that continued to make it a unique center for the
consecration of literature:
It seems to me that Paris has always been, only more and more so, a
true fair-you know, an auction, where one sells to the highest bidder
everything that the world of culture has produced elsewhere, in other
parts of the globe ... In order to exist it is necessary to pass through
Paris. Latin American literature existed before the French [noticed it],
like existentialisrn, Russian formalism, etc, etc., but in order to achieve
the status of universal patrimony it had to pass through Paris. This is
what Parisian cuisine amounts to. Emigrations, universities, theses and
prose compositions, translations, commentaries: in a word, cuisine.
That's what French culture is. 6
For Kis, Paris was therefore at the center of a market, an auction involv-
ing the sale and exchange of intellectual goods from ail over the world,
which must be displayed there if they are to achieve the status of "uni-
versaI patrim.ony," that is, to acquire the value recognized in this rnarket.
Owing to its dualliterary and political function, Paris also represents
the last bulwark against national censorship: its historical reputation as
the capital of every form of liberty-political, aesthetic, and moral-
makes it a beacon of freedOlTI for writers. It was in Paris that Kis chose
exile in order to escape censorship and official harrassrnent in Belgrade
during the 197os; and that Nabokov's LoUta had been published in the
face of American censorship two decades earlier, in 1955, along with
William Burroughs' Naked Lunch in 1959.
In the 196os,Jean-Paul Sartre personally embodied the accumulated
wealth of four centuries of French literary and intellectual activity, al-
lTIOSt single-handedly concentrating the totality of historical belief and
The Fabtic of the Ul1iversal 1 129

Parisian credit.7 As an inteIlectual comrnitted to the cause of the politi-
caIly repressed, he also becarne one of the rnost powerful sources of rec-
ognition in the world of literature, notably on behalf of Faulkner and
Dos Passos. Mario Vargas Llosa evoked Sartre's stature in the eyes of
young inteIlectuals throughout the world who came to Paris in search of
literary ITlOdernity:
It will be as diffÏcult for readers in the future to have an exact idea of

the importance of Sartre to this era as it is for us to understand exactly
what Voltaire, Victor Hugo or Gide meant to their age. He was, like
them, that curious French institution: the intellectual mandarin. That
is, someone who is seen as a teacher, beyond what he knows, what he
writes or even what he says, a man on whom a huge public confers
the power to legislate on matters ranging from the largest moral, cul-
tural and political questions to the most trivial [ones] ... It will be dif-
ficult for those who know Sartre oilly through his books to under-
_stand to what extent the things that he said or did not say, or what it
was thought he might have said, had an impact on thousands of people
and became transformed into forms ofbehaviour, "vital choices."8
Sartre's immense power of consecration rnade him a sort of embodi-

ment ofliterary modernity, someone who fixed the limits ofliterary art
by designating a present of literature: "Apart from stiITmlating us to
move away from a regionalist literary frarnework," Vargas Llosa remarks,
"we realized, albeit secondhand, through reading Sartre that narrative
had undergone a revolution, that the range of its themes had diversified
in ail directions and that the modes of narration were both freer and
more complicated ... the first volumes of Roads to Freedom and Sartre's
essays enabled many of us to discover literature at the beginning of the
fifties."9
The road to worldwide recognition for William Faulkner likewise
went through Paris. Faulkner's early literary career in the United States
was a very difficult one. Conùng after Soldier's Pa}' (I926), Mosquitoes
(I927), and the failure of Sarto ris (I929), The Sound and the Fur}' (I929)
brought him a certain measure of critical notice (though the book sold
only I,789 copies). As 1 Lay Dying (I930) was foIlowed by his first real
success, Sanctuary (published in a first version in I93 I, then in final form
the next year)--a succès de scandale, in fact, selling rnore than 6,500 copies
in less than two months. Yet for another fifteen years Faulkner was to re-

main practicaIly unknown in his own country. It was only in 1946-
only three years before receiving the Nobel Prize and weIl after his con-
secration in France-that Malcolm Cowley's anthology The Portable
Faulkner won hirn the recognition of critics in the United States as one
of the masters of American literature, reviving sales of his books.
In France, by contrast, he was recognized very early on as one of the
great innovators of the century. Already in 193 l, two years after the pub-
lication of The Sound and the Fury, Maurice-Edgar Coindreau published
in the Nouvelle Revue Française a critical study of the six novels published
by Faulkner up until that tirne. lO Apart from two brief essays published
in the United States and a dozen reviews in the American press, half of
which betrayed a total incomprehension, only two other studies of
Faulkner had previously appeared. 11 As l Lay Dying was translated by
Coindreau in 1932, with a preface by Larbaud, but came out in France
orùy after Sanctuary, which was issued in 1933 with a preface by André
Malraux. Gallimard published The Sound and the Fury in August 1938.
Sartre's review the foIlowing year established Faulkner as one of the
greatest novelists of the century.12 Jean-Louis Barrault had already
adapted As l Lay Dying for the stage during the 1934-35 season, as Al-
bert Camus was later to do with Requiemfor a Nun (1951) in 1956. It was
on account of his consecration by the most erninent French writers and
critics of the day that Faulkner was able to enjoy worldwide recognition
during his lifetirne, from the late 1940S until his death in 1962. The No-
bel Prize, which confirmed his international reputation, was a direct
consequence of this Parisian benediction.
Brussels, a capital in open rivalry with Paris, also enjoyed the power of
consecrating works of literature. The simplistic picture of Brussels as a
minor center under the influence of its more glarnorous neighbor needs
to be set against the rnore complex reality of a city that functioned as a
crossroads, a rallying point for members of the avant-garde cast out of
the great European capitals, a place that offered a second chance for ail
the moderns rejected and ignored by Paris. 13 Brussels' freedom from na-
tionalist resentment and defensiveness made it attentive to aIl forms of
cultural novelty and ITlOdernity. As a country belatedly and artificially
created in 1830, the very youth ofBelgium shielded it from the ancient
antagonisrns that divided older European nations. Apart frOITl the inven-
tion of a national tradition that borrowed more from painting (from the
The Pabric of the Universal 1 13 l

Flemish primitives to Rubens) than from popular culture, Belgiurn's dis-
tinctiveness and relative advantage derived from its openness to Europe
as a whole. Particularly after I870, when even French literary elites
found thernselves held hostage to nationalist sentirnent, Brussels pro-
vided writers with an alternative to Paris.
In the aftermath of the Franco-PrussianWar, anti-German bias
blinded the French to aesthetic innovation corning from across the
Rhine. But Brussels celebrated Wagner, putting on Lohengrin in I870
and becoming the capital ofWagnerism outside Germany. The aesthetic
conformism of the Opéra Français led French composers who had been
rejected in Paris to turn to Belgium-among them Jules Massenet,
whose Hérodiade was an immense success in l 881. Vincent d'Indy settled
in Brussels, where he received an enthusiastic welcome. The Cercle des
XX, founded in l 883 by a group of young independent painters for the
purpose of advancing new artistic ideas, helped artists frorn aIl over the
world show their work. The Vingtistes, as they were known, offered a
welcorne in Brussels to avant-garde movements in search of critical rec-
ognition, proposing a theoretical basis for their work and giving it legiti-
macy through reviews and exhibitions. It was in Brussels that the Im-
pressionists, N eoimpressionists, and unknown artists su ch as Toulouse-
Lautrec, Gauguin, and Van Gogh (who sold the only canvas that was to
find a buyer during his lifetime there) made friends and won admirers.
N eoimpressionism, very popular among Belgian painters, was especially
cornrnented on and praised (Félix Fénéon, the Paris correspondent of
L'Art Moderne, was the first to promote the movement as a radical ad-
vance over Impressionism).
Similarly, in the hope of dispelling the influence of French realism on
fictional aesthetics, Belgian writers lent their support to the Symbolist
challenge that first emerged in France, reappropriating its techniques
through the filter of Flemish mysticism (Maurice Maeterlinck, for ex-
ample, translatedJan van Ruusbroec [I293-138I]) and German philoso-
phy and poetry. Their cosmopolitanisrn-which is to say their bilingual-
isrn and cultural openness-allowed thern to devise new approaches and
even to anticipate the aesthetic innovations of French writers. Brussels
very quickly became the capital of Symbolisrn: Mallarrné found excep-
tionally favorable conditions for publication there, as he later recounted
in the poem "La rernémoration d'amis belges" (Remernbrance of Bel-
I3 2 1 THE WORLD REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

gian Friends, 1899);14 and Maeterlinck (acclaimed by Octave Mirbeau in
a famous 1890 article in Le Figaro as the "new Shakespeare") invented
Symbolist theater, subsequently popularized by Aurélien Lugné-Poë, a
lTlarginal stage director in Paris whose productions of Maeterlinck and
Ibsen captured the attention ofBelgian critics and theatergoers in 1893.
By supporting German artists in the face of French prejudice, as weil
as unrecognized French artists against the established avant-gardes in
France (such as the Impressionists), and by championing English art and
the pre-Raphaelites (admired by the Belgian practitioners of art décoratif
in the l 890s), Belgian artists lTlanaged to avoid, bypass, or otherwise re-
duce the constant interference ofParisian authorities. The cosmopolitan
openness of Brussels to artistic invention in Europe made it a workshop
where some of the most important artistic revolutions of the late nine-
teenth century were able to be carried out, sheltered against the pressure
of politics and the weight of tradition that made thernselves felt in
neighboring countries. In a sense Brussels had become a second Paris: as
a claimant to artistic lTlOdernity in its own right, it was able to conse-
crate avant-gardes at a mornent when the French capital was beginning
to lose some of its special and autonomous character with the revival of
ancient antagonisms and the growth of nationalist feeling.
TRANSLATION AS lITTÉRISATION
Translation is the forelTIost exarnple of a particular type of consecration
in the literary world. 15 Its true nature as a form of literary recognition
(rather than a mere exchange of one language for another or a purely
horizontal transfer that provides a useful measure of the volume of pub-
lishing transactions in the world) goes unrecognized on account of its
apparent neutrality. N onetheless it constitutes the principal means of ac-
cess to the literary world for ail writers outside the center. Translation is
the m.ajor prize and weapon in internationalliterary competition, an in-
strument whose use and purpose differ depending on the position of the
translator with respect to the text translated-that is, on the relation be-
tween what are commonly cailed "source" and "target" languages. 16 We
have already examined the literary inequality of languages, which gives
rise, at least in part, to the inequality faced by participants in the world
literary game. The analysis of translation therefore depends on the point
of view adopted-that of the translator or of the author whose work is
The Pabric of the Universal 1 133

being translated-and on the relationship between the languages in-
volved. The combination of these two factors de termines the selection
of cases that are examined in the present work.
For an impoverished target language, which is to say a language on
the periphery that looks to import rnajor works of literature, 17 transla-
tion is a way of gathering literary resources, of acquiring universal texts
and thereby enriching an underfunded litera ture-in short, a way of di-
verting literary assets. The program of the Gerrnan Ronuntics for trans-
lating the classics, carried out during the course of the nineteenth cen-
tury, was an enterprise of this type, as 1 shall go on to show in greater
detail. Works of great literary subversiveness, ones that leave a mark in
the center, are often translated by writers who thernselves are interna-
tional and polyglot and who, determined to break with the norms of
their native literary space, seek to introduce into their language the mo-
dernity of the center (whose domination they perpetuate by doing
just- this). Thus Danilo Kis translated Hungarian poets (Ady, Petofi,
Radnoti), Russian poets (Mandelstam, Yesenin, Tsvetayeva), and French
poets (Corneille, Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Verlaine, Prévert, Queneau)
into Serbo-Croatian; Vergilio Ferreira introduced Sartre to Portuguese
readers; Arno Schmidt translated Poe, Faulkner, and Joyce into Ger-
man;18 Borges translated Hart Crane, E. E. Cmnrnings, Robert Penn
Warren, and Faulkner into Spanish;19 Nabokov translated Lewis Carroll
into Russian; Daigaku Horiguchi irnported works by Verlaine, Apol-
linaire, Jarnrnes, Cocteau, and Morand into Japanese, thus helping to
profoundly alter the aesthetic norms of a developing literary space;
Dezso Kosztolanyi translated Shakespeare, Byron, Wilde, Baudelaire, and
Verlaine into his native Hungarian. These intermediaries rnay be seen as
having performed an opposite and cornplementary function to that of
the international figures of the great capitals: instead of introducing the
periphery to the center in order to consecrate it, they made the center
(and what had already been consecrated there) known in the periphery
by translating its major productions. By importing to their own coun-·
tries the modernity decreed at the Greenwich meridian, they played an
essential role in the process of unifYing literary space.
Considering the same operation from the point of view of a major
source language, translation permits the international diffilsion of central
literary capital. 20 By extending the power and prestige of the great liter-
ary countries, with the assistance of polyglot writers in small countries,

it broadens the influence of languages and literatures that pretend to
universality and thus adds to their supply of credit. Additionally, it dis-
seminates the aesthetic norms prevailing in the center, albeit with a de-
lay, since translation itself takes time.
From the point of view of a major target language, on the other hand,
the importation ofliterary texts written in "small" languages or ones be-
longing to neglected literatures serves as a means of annexation, of di-
verting peripheral works and adding them to the stock of central re-
sources: universal capital increases, as Valéry observed, thanks to the
activity of the great consecrating translators. The dornination that they
exert requires them, almost as a matter of noblesse oblige one might say,
to "discover" nonnative writers who suit their literary categories. But
from the point of view of a minor source language, this operation in-
volves much more than a sirnple exchange of texts: it amounts, in fact, to
acceding to the status of literature, to obtaining a certificate of literary
standing. It is this form of translation-as consecration-that interests us
here.
The notion ofliterariness, which is to say the literary credit that atta-
ches to a language independently of its strictly linguistic capital, makes it
possible to consider the translation of dorninated authors as an act of
consecration that gives them access to literary visibility and existence.
Writers from languages that are not recognized (or are recognized only
to a small degree) as literary are not immediately eligible for consecra-
tion. The condition of their works' being received into the literary
world is translation into a major literary language. For translation is not
sirnply a form of naturalization (in the sense of exchanging one nation·-
ality for another), or the passage from one language to another; it is,
much more specifically, a littérisation. The writers of the Latin American
"boom," for example, began to exist in internationalliterary space only
with their translation into French and their recognition by French crit-
ics. For the sarne reason Jorge Luis Borges claimed to be an invention
of France. The international recognition of Danilo Riscoincided with
his consecration via translation into French, which lifted him out of
the shadow of his native Serbo-Croatian. The universal recognition of
Rabindranath Tagore-symbolized by his Nobel Prize-dated from the
Bengali poet's translation of his own work into English. The Zairean
writer and intellectual Pius Ngandu Nkashama has emphasized, while at
the same time denying, the central role of translation in assuring conse-
The Pabric of the Universal 1 13 5

cration for African writers: "The failing of African authors has often
been to believe that a literary text has value only if it has been accredited
as such by a magnanimousWest ... It is as though an author in an Afri-
can language objectively attains literary status only from the moment
that he produces a text in other languages, in this case those of the colo-
nizer ... A moral credit can be granted him on the basis of translations
duly authorized in the world."21
To define the translation of dominated authors as littérisation, which is
to say as an actual metamorphosis, a change of literary being, makes it
possible to resolve a whole series of problerns generated by the belief in
the equality-or, better, the sYlnmetry-of different types of translation,
uniforrnly conceived as simple transfers of meaning fronl one language
to another. Literary transmutation is achieved by crossing a magic fron-
tier that ailows a text composed in an unprestigious language-or even a
nonliterary language, which is to say one that either does not exist or is
unrecognized in the verbal rnarketplace-to pass into a literary lan-
guage. Accordingly, 1 define littérisation as any operation-translation,
self-translation, transcription, direct composition in the donrinant lan-
guage-by means of which a text from a literarily deprived country
cornes to be regarded as literary by the legitimate authorities. No matter
the language in which they are written, these texts must in one fashion
or another be translated if they are to ob tain a certificate of literariness.
Salman Rushdie, who as an English-speaking Indian writer would ap-
pear not to have to concern himself with the problem of translation,
nonetheless insists upon a sort of constitutive elernent of self-translation
in the act of writing: "The word 'translation' cornes, etymologicaily,
from the Latin for 'bearing across.' Having been borne across the world,
we are translated nlen. It is norrnaily supposed that sornething always
gets lost in translation; 1 ding, obstinately, to the notion that sOlnething
can also be gained."22
The transmutation and translation ofliterary texts represents a gamut
of strategies--a continuurn of solutions to the problem of escaping liter-
ary destitution and invisibility. In the careers of many writers, looking at
the successive stages of their consecration, it is possible to detect ail the
ways in which the conditions for achieving visibility laid down by the
consecrating authorities cause texts to be transformed. For Strindberg it
was not a question of writing in French for its own sake, or of being
translated into French, any more than it was for ]oyce.What mattered to

each of thern was advancing to the status of a writer-a practitioner of
literature-through the adoption, directly or via translation, of a lan-
guage that was considered to be the incarnation of literature par excel-
lence.
LANGUAGE GAMES
August Strindberg's various attempts to achieve fame in France can be
seen as a sort of paradigrn of littérisation. Resolved from the beginning of
his exile in I883 (at the age of thirty-four) to "conquer" Paris, Strind-
berg explored the whole range of possibilities for obtaining literary rec-
ognition. 23 Although his earliest plays and collections of stories had been
rapidly translated into French, they met with no response in Paris. In his
first years there, having few friends and fewer contacts, he saw no alter-
native but to act as his own translator.With the opening of the Théâtre-
Libre in I887, Strindberg hoped that Érnile Zola could be persuaded to
read his new play Fadren (The Father). 24 A little later Strindberg met a
translator, Georges Loiseau, with whorn he began to collaborate. Thus
self-translation was followed by assisted translation, a second stage in
which the writer continues to take an active part in rewriting his text
in the hope of bringing his work to the attention of a broad public.
Strindberg rnanaged at last to attract interest in theatrical circles: on the
heels of Antoine's production of Froken Julie (Miss Julie, I887) at the
Théâtre-Libre in l 893, Fordringsagare (Creditors, I888) was successfully
staged by Lugné~ Poë the following year in a translation credited to
Loiseau but based on Strindberg's own version. Finally, somewhat ern-
barrassed no doubt by the need to rely on a translator, Strindberg de-
cided to write directly in French. He composed a few short stories and
tales and then, in I887, Le plaidoyer d}unfou (The Confession of a FooI),
in which he sought to compete with French novelists by emulating the
"light" style of Maupassant. 25
To Edvard Brandes, brother of the cri tic Georg Brandes and himself
an inftuential journalist, he eXpIained his situation: "Do 1 intend to be-
COUle a French writer? No! 1 only rnake use of French for want of a uni-
versaI language and 1 will continue to do so when 1 write."26 French
served solely as an access ramp to literature for Strindberg. 27 lndeed, his
present-day editor and translator in France, Carl Bjurstrorn, notes that
Strindberg had no particular fondness for the French language. In the
event his strategy proved effective: The Conjèssion of a Fooi found a pub-
The Fabric of the UnÎversal 1 137

lisher in Paris in I895, having already been translated and successfuily
published in Germany. Then, in l 896-97, Strindberg wrote Injèrno in
French and published it to great acclaim with Mercure de France in l 898.
It was only once he became famous that he abandoned writing in
French. In other words, once literary existence and visibility have been
achieved, translation again becomes a sirrlple rnatter of carrying a text
over frorn one language to another; at this point the writer from an out-
lying country can begin writing in his native tongue again, free from the
need to work directly in the dominant language.
By the end of the I890s, then, Strindberg had solved the problem of
translation by adopting the rrlOst radical solution possible: writing in
French. At about the same time, as we have seen, Rubén Dario devised a
not dissimilar solution, namely to give Spanish a French cast, in effect
fusing the two languages through the technique of "rrlental Gailicism."
In this case, the invention of a sort of hybrid language made it possible
to _get around the translation problem. Self-translation represents an in-
termediate position between the two. One of the greatest self-transla-
tors, of course, was Vladimir Nabokov. Like Strindberg, he came gradu-
aily to reject the idea of having to rely on intermediaries, preferring to
publish his own translations of himself
Nabokov was a Russian writer until the eve of the Second World
War. Between I9I9 and I92I around a million people had fled Russia, a
great many inteilectuals among them. Nabokov's family left St. Peters-
burg in I920 and settled in Berlin, which became the inteilectual center
of the Russian disapora in its first decade. Weimar Germany counted
sorne fort y Russian publishing houses during the I920S as weil as a great
many newspapers and magazines. 28 The young Nabokov, who was flu-
ent in both English and French as weil, published his first stories and po-
ems in Berlin, in Russian, notably in the daily paper Raul and in various
reviews. His first two novels, Mashen'ka (Mary, I926) and Ka ra l, dama, va-
let (King, Queen, Knave, I928), were also published in Gerrrlany.
By the beginning of the I930S, Paris had taken over frorn Berlin as the
capital of the Russian érnigré community.29 Its most prestigious review,
Sovremennyia Zapiski (Contemporary Annals), which in the rneantime
had moved there from Germany as weil, agreed to publish Nabokov's
new novel, Zashchita Luzhina (The Defense, I930), in three instailments.
Russian critics greeted it with hostility. But then, with the publication of
an enthusiastic review in the I5 February I930 issue of Les Nouvelles

Littéraires by the French critic André Levinson, the situation sudderùy
changed. In the space of a week, and even before the original Russian
version of the novel had appeared in its entirety, Nabokov signed a con-
tract with Fayard for the French translation. 30 Recognition in France al-
lowed hirn to cross the Rhine without leaving Berlin and at the sarne
tüne to escape the anatherna of Russian critical opinion.
Nonetheless he found it hard to rnake a living and continued to pub-
lish his work in Sovremennyia Zapiski as well as Poslednie Novosti) the
leading Russian daily newspaper in Paris and the largest tide of the
énligré press-his orùy sources of Inoney fronl writing. 31 His novel
Kamera Obskura appeared first in seriaI forrn in 1932,32 and then in a
French edition two years later with Grasset as Chambre obscure. This
translation brought hün further recognition and led to others: shortly
afterward he signed contracts for Swedish, Czech, and English versions
of his novels. But in 1935, reviewing the English version of Kamera
Obskura)33 he discovered its rnediocrity: "It was loose, shapeless, sloppy,
full of blunders and gaps, lacking vigor and spring, and plumped down
in such dull, fiat English that I could not read it to the end; all of which
is rather hard on an author who airns in his work at absolute precision,
takes the utlnost trouble to ob tain it, and then finds the translator calmly
undoing every blessed phrase."34 Nabokov nonetheless approved the
translation, in order not to forgo his first opportunity ofbeing published
in English, while resolving to translate his next book, Otchaianie (De-
spair, 1936), himself. Already he seerns to have understood, as an author
writing in a dominated language and lac king national support, that ifhe
wished to exist literarily in Europe he had no choice but to act as his
own translator.
Like E. M. Cioran, Panait Istrati, Strindberg, and many others, Nabo-
kov found rewriting his work in another language a terrible ordeal: "To
translate onself is a fi"ightful business, looking over one's insides and try-
ing them on like a glove, and discovering the best dictionary to be not a
friend but the enelny camp."35 Despair; which appeared in England with
a publisher of popular novels, went as unnoticed as Camera Obscura. But
in 1937 he signed a contract with Gallimard for a French edition on the
basis of the English translation36-as if, paradoxically, he hoped to be
able to assure a greater degree of fidelity by insisting upon a translation
that he had personally supervised into a language more widely read than
Russian. It was also in Paris that Nabokov began his first novel to be

written in English, The Real Lifè of Sebastian K"night. Mter alrnost twenty
years of various attempts to affirm his identity as a Russian author, he
found himself confronted with the same dilemrnas as all exiled writers.
By the late 1930S all hope of returning to Russia had vanished, and he
could not hope to make a living by his pen if this meant writing for a
public as narrow and as dispersed as the Russian émigré cOIllITlUnity. In
order to attain genuine literary existence and recognition, he had to
"carry over" his work into one of the two great literary languages he
knew. For a time he hoped to settle in France, but financial and adminis-
trative problems cornbined to make life difficult for hirn there. In any
case his English was better th an his French, and with the approach of
war in Europe he chose to seek refuge in Anlerica. Aside from "Made-
moiselle 0" and an essay on Pushkin ("Pouchkine ou le vrai et le
vraisemblable"), he wrote nothing directly in French.
Nabokov set out for the United States in 1940 and almost at once be-
carne an English-Ianguage writer: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight was
published in New York in 1941, with the support ofDelrnore Schwartz,
by the avant-garde publishing house New Directions. But literary rec-
ognition and success were still to come from Paris. LoUta) which seemed
an unbearable provocation in the puritanical atnlosphere of postwar
America, appeared in Paris in 1955 between the green covers of Mau-
rice Girodias' Olympia Press following rejection by four American pub-
lishers-much as Joyce's scandalous Ulysses had been published in Paris
in the 1920S in defiance of the diktats of moral censorship, first in Eng-
lish and then in a French translation. Hounded by French censors, de-
layed by trials and English customs, and crowned by a succès de scandale)
the book was finally published in the United States three years later, in
1958. Nabokov, who until then had been an American author of no
great notoriety, suddenly enjoyed an immense international reputation.
Ali this goes to show that he did not, as is often said, have two lives as a
writer, one in each of his two literary languages. He knew the difficult
fate of an exiled and dominated writers who, in order to be able to exist
literarily and to attain true creative autononly-which is to say, to avoid
dependence on unsupervised translations-choose to become, in Rush-
die's phrase, translated men.
Samuel Beckett, in the la te 1940s, pioneered a novel solution: self-
translation in both directions. It needs to be kept in mind that earlier, as
a young Anglophone writer from Dublin, he had himself traversed all

the stages just described. After having published a collection of stories,
More Pricks than Kicks (1934), with Chatto and Windus in London-a
book that was banned in lreland and sold only five hundred copies-
and a year later, at his own expense, a collection of poerns, Echo s Bones;
and afrer having subrnitted the manuscript of Murphy to forty~two Eng-
lish publishers in 1936 and 1937-the novel was finally published in
1938 by Routledge in London and translated into French by Beckett
and Alfred Péron in 1947 for Éditions Bordas-Beckett looked for other
ways to rnake hünself known. Following the publication in Les Temps
Modernes of a nurnber of poems written in French, and the composition
of Watt in English during the war,37 he wrote several short stories di-
rectly in French. Then carne his great creative period in Paris, during
which he composed his first great works in French: in 1946 he wrote
Mercier et Camier (Mercier and Carnier), Premier amour (First Love, un-
published until I970), L'Expulsé (The Expelled), and Suite (which be-
carne La fin de partie, Endgame in English); in l 947 he began Molloy;
in I948 he finished Molloy, wrote Maione meurt (Malone Dies), and
sketched En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot), which he reworked
and cornpleted in I949, before beginning L'Innommable (The Unname-
able).
Beckett knew that if he wished to have a chance of being published
and seeing his plays perforrned in the theater he had no choice but to
write in French: En attendant Godot (I952) and Fin de partie, dedicated to
Roger Blin and first staged in London (in French) in l 9 57, finally per-
rnitted hirn to stake his daim to literary existence. But in following this
almost canonical course Beckett adopted a strategy so radical that it
stands without parallel in the history of literature: rather th an choose
one language over another, he resolved to remain the rest of his life a
translated writer-only a self-translated writer, no longer dependent
upon translators but working instead between two languages. Beckett's
cornrnitn1ent to bilingualisrn reflected his deterrnination to create a dual
oeuvre: beginning in 1950 with his translation of Textes pour rien (Texts
for Nothing, I955) and then the following year of Molloy (195I),38 he
translated and rewrote alrnost everything from one language into the
other, both frorn French into English and from English into French.
The infinitely diverse practice of self-translation is at least to sorne ex-
tent a way for authors to try to achieve literary freedorn by retaining
control over the form of their writings, and thus to daim an absolute
The Pabric afthe Universal 1 I4 I

autonorny. We know that Beckett was never, or only very seldom, will-
ing to entrust his translations to others.Joyce, in Finnegans Wake) had al-
ready taken matters a step further, having got around the painful and ap-
parently intractable problem of translation by cornposing a text that is
effectively untranslatable) which is to say alrnost completely independent
oflinguistic, cornmercial, or national constraints.
Literary history as it is ordinarily conceived prevents us from und er-

standing the crucial role played by translators in the international re-
public of letters. Since historians of literature restrict theulselves-to
simplify somewhat-to examining the particular (and typically dehis-
toricized) history of an individual author, or giving a general account of
the development of a nationalliterature, or else reviewing the history of
the different interpretations ("readings") of a given text over time, the
process of consecration and littérisation--authorized by critics and car-
ried ,out by translators-is always passed over in silence, forgotten or
sünply ignored. It can be perceived only by looking at the general design
of the structure of the world of letters, and at the balance of power in-
herent in this structure: thus the "pattern in the carpet" of which Henry
James spoke. The work of a translator such as Valery Larbaud, who dis-
covered a great many authors, who introduced Faulkner, Joyce, Butler,
and Ramon Goulez de la Serna among others to readers in France-
the work of this one man, as immense as it was invisible, profoundly
changed and renewed world literature. It was the great translations of
Faulkner's novels by Maurice-Edgar Coindreau that made his consecra-
tion and universal recognition possible; yet they go unmentioned in the
official history of literature. 39 The translator, having become the indis·-
pensable intermediary for crossing the borders of the literary world, is an
essential figure in the history of writing. The great translators of the
centralliterary countries are the true architects of the universal, which is
to say of the attempt to unify literary space.
Larbaud described hünself as an "introducer and interrnediary;' a
meulber of a "cosmopolitan clergy" that takes its motta from Saint
Jerome: "A single religion, alllanguages."4o The unitary religion in this
case is literature-the handiwork of translators who create unity out of
linguistic diversity. Indeed, the autonomy of translators from central
literary spaces derives frorn their obedience to the literary law that pro-
hibits subnùssion to linguistic and political division. Larbaud, conscious

of occupying an ignored yet essential place in the world of literature,
sought to restore the dignity of the translator's labor. In establishing an
irnpressive genealogy of French Anglicists, he recalled the rnost eminent
narnes among the many bilingual poets and writers in France who facil-
itated the passage of texts frorn English to their native language and, by
helping to strengthen the autonorny of these two great literary spaces,
founded on n1utual knowledge and reciprocal consecration, contributed
to their graduaI unification:
It was Voltaire who started everything, who founded the venerable

Order of Interpreters of English Thought. A truly venerable order
since (to restrict ourselves to France) it counted, apart from its great
representatives and its generations of specialists . . . illustrious writers
and great poets su ch as Chateaubriand, Vigny, Hugo, Sainte-Beuve,
Taine, Baudelaire, Laforgue, Mallarmé, and Marcel Schwob ... But
Voltaire ... was the man on account of whom the great posthumous
destiny of Shakespeare came to be realized, and the builder of the in-
visible bridge that linked the intel1ectual life of England with that of
the continent. His achievement is unsurpassable. 41
When self-translation is irnpossible, the translator assumes a key role,

becoming almost a double, an alter ego, a substitute author responsible
for carrying over a text from an unknown and unliterary language into
the world of literature. Arnong the notable instances of authors and
translators who have collaborated as inseparable partners in order to
achieve literary status, the case of the Polish writer Witold Gornbrowicz
(I904-I969) stands out. Marooned on the eve of the SecondWorld War
in Argentina, where he was to remain for twenty-four years (from I939
to I964), he began-just as Strindberg had done before him, and as
Beckett was to do afterward-by translating his own writings. In this
way he was able to publish Spanish versions of his first novel, Perdydurke
(originally published in Warsaw in I937), and a play, Slub (The Mar-
riage), in I947 in Buenos Aires. Then, at a new stage (or second degree)
in the search for literary recognition, he translated The Marriage into
French with the help of two Frenchwomen and sent the typescript to
Albert Camus and Jean-Louis Barrault, as weil as the Polish text to Mar-
tin Buber. In 1951 he became a contributor to KUltura, a Polish émigré
review in Paris. The serialization in its pages of his second novel, Trans-
Atlantyk, led to its publication in book fonn (though still in Polish, to-
The Fabric ~fthe Universal 1 I43

gether with Slub) in 1953 as part of the "Bibliothèque de Kultura," a se-
ries sponsored by the Institut Littéraire de Paris.
Gornbrowicz knew that access to literature necessarily passed through
Paris: "It seerns that in Poland 1 am read on the sly," he wrote to his pub-
lisher Maurice Nadeau in 1957. "Good news at least. But it is frorn Paris
that everything rnust start."42 A few years earlier Gombrowicz had made
the acquaintance of Constantin Jelenski, who rapidIy becarne his inter-
rnediary, translator, and introducer in the French capital. A m.enlber of
the secretariat of the Congrès pour la Liberté de la Culture and of the
editorial board of the review PreuvesJelenski was (to quote his country-
man Francisek Karpinski) "effectively Gombrowicz's double."43 He not
only translated Gornbrowicz's work but wrote prefaces and worked to
promote it to a wider audience. 44 "Having smashed rny Argentinian
cage," Gombrowicz wrote in his diary, Jelenski "built me a bridge to
Paris."45 Elsewhere he added, "Each foreign-language edition of my
booJ<:s ought to bear the seal 'thanks to Jelenski."'46 FrOlTI the time of
Jelenski's first atternpts to make hirn known in the early 1950S, Gornbro-
wicz, although (or perhaps because) he lived in Argentina, understood
that his chance to attain literary recognition lay with his agent across the
Atlantic:
Jelenski-who is he? He appeared on my horizon, over there, very far

away, in Paris, and there he is, struggling for me. It has been a long
time-never perhaps-since l have experienced so resolute, so disin-
terested a confirmation ofwhat l am, ofwhat l write ... Jelenski de-
fends me every step of the way before the Polish emigration authori-
ties. He works to give me ail the advantages offered by the situation he
has created for himself in Paris and by his growing prestige in high in-
tellectual circles. He takes my manuscripts around to publishers. He
has already managed to win me a handful of supporters, and not the
least ones. 47
Considering the case of Gombrowicz and his passage from self-transla-

tion to remote collaboration with a translator and personal representa-
tive who becanle a sort of alter ego, acting abroad as his proxy and
spokesman, it becornes clear that the problem of translation must be an-
alyzed as a process of graduaI ernergence in which the writer himself
may intervene, directly or indirectly, in a variety of different ways.48

If a writer finds himself obliged to engage the services of a translator, but
nonetheless is Huent enough in the target language to be able to revise a
translator's draft, it very often happens-as we saw in the case of Strind-
berg-that he assumes an active role in the translation ofhis own work.
This was particularly true of Joyce, who found in Valery Larbaud at
once an introducer, a translator, and a unique source of literary legiti-
rnacy. Larbaud had read the first episodes of Ulysses published in the Lit-
tle Review with enthusiasm. It was the prestige ofhis name in Parisian lit-
erary circles, his willingness to translate the book himself (in the end, to
supervise the translation), and his Decernber 192 l public lecture at the
Maison des Amis des Livres (many times reprinted and even translated
into English for The Criterion-further proof that consecration in Paris
was the condition of existing literarily elsewhere) that persuaded Sylvia
Beach to transform Shakespeare and Company into a publishing house
for the sole purpose of bringing out Ulysses in its original version, and
then Adrienne Monnier to commission a French translation. Although
Joyce's reputation was already great in Anglo-American literary cir-
cles-especiaily among An1erican exiles in Paris-he found it impossi-
ble at the beginning of the 1920S to find a publisher for Ulysses: his writ-
ings were considered scandalous and until then had been brought out by
smail houses that subsequendy found thernselves the target of British
and American censors. Four issues of the Little Review (in which the
novel appeared in instailrnents between 1918 and 1920) were seized and
burned for obscenity by the U.S. Post Office until finaily the New York
Society for the Suppression of Vice succeeded in having publication
prohibited altogether. 49 It was therefore thanks to the literary authorities
of Paris that Ulysses enjoyed a dual publication; but the book found an
English-Ianguage publisher only as a consequence of the critical verdict
of a great translator.
Despite Larbaud's central and active role in this process of consecra-
tion and ennoblement, Joyce refused to leave rnatters whoily to his
judgrnent. The translators of Ulysses--Auguste Morel and Stuart Gil-
bert, supervised by Larbaud-ail found their work subject to review by
the author. The tide page of the definitive version published in Paris by
Adrienne Monnier in 1929 instituted a subde hierarchy among the par-
ticipants while confiding the major role to the author: "Unabridged
French translation by M. Auguste Morel, assisted by M. Stuart Gilbert,
entirely revised by Valery Larbaud and the author." Similar control was
The Pabric afthe Universal 1 145

exerted over Beckett during his first stay in Paris the same year. At
Joyce's request he worked on the French translation of "Anna Livia
Plurabelle," one of the rnost celebrated sections of the Work in Progress} in
collaboration with Alfred Péron, whorn he had rnet at Trinity College,
Dublin, sorne years earlier. Their text rnet with the approval of the au-
thor, who was about to send it to the printer for the next issue of the
Nouvelle Revue Française when he happened to show it to three of his
friends, Philippe Soupault, Paul Léon, and Ivan Goll. Gradually the
translation carne to be challenge d, reworked, then entirely revised. It ap-
peared in May 193 1 in volurne 19 of the NRF under the narnes of Sam-
uel Beckett, Alfred Péron, Ivan Goll, Eugène Jolas, Paul Léon, Adrienne
Monnier, and Philippe Soupault, "in collaboration with the author."50
It is plain that translation into French, owing to Paris' unique power
of consecration, occupies a special place in the literary world. Paradoxi-
cally, however, it does not require a corresponding belief in the irnpor-
tan~e of French literature or the French language as such; indeed, nei-
ther Joyce nor Strindberg nor Beckett took any interest whatever in
French literary life. But the prestige of translation into French had been
unquestioned since the eighteenth century. While no one would drearn
of denying that English literature has been one of the rnost important in
Europe for at least as long, or that it has strongly influenced the whole of
European (and especially French) literature, the fact rernains that the
greatest English authors enjoyed truly univers al recognition during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries only through the translation of
their writings into French. Shakespeare was read throughout Europe in
Le Tourneur's translations; Byron and Moore in Pichot's versions, Sterne
in that of Fresnais, Richardson in that of Prévost. Frorn 1814 (the year
Waverley was published) until Walter Scott's death in 1832, his novels
were translated into French by Defauconpret as they appeared: it was to
these versions that they owed their Îlllinense worldwide faIne. Scott's
novels were read either in French or in translations based on the French
version. Thus, for example, the entire series of Waverley novels was trans-
lated after 1830 from French into Spanish.
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING UNIVERSAL

Literary prizes, the least literary fonn of literary consecration, are re-
sponsible rnainly for making the verdicts of the sanctioning organs of
the republic of letters known beyond its borders. As the n10st apparent

of the mechanisms of consecration, they represent a sort of confirmation
for the benefit of the general public. Nonetheless, in keeping with the
laws of world literature, the rnore international the prize, the more spe-
cifie it is. Thus the greatest proof of literary consecration, bordering
on the definition of literary art itself, is the Nobel Prize-a European
award established at the beginning of the twentieth century that gradu-
ally came to enjoy worldwide authority. Today writers everywhere are
agreed in recognizing it as the highest honor of the world of letters.
There is no better measure of the unification of the international liter-
ary field than the effectively univers al respect cornmanded by this prize.
It is also indisputably the most prestigious prize beyond the borders of
the literary world. For more than one hundred years now, the Nobel has
been the virtually unchallenged arbiter of literary excellence. No one
(or almost no one) professes any longer to be surprised at the esteem in
which this institution is everywhere held,51 nor does anyone doubt the
validity of the worldwide reputation that it confers upon a single writer
each year. By agreeing to act as executor of the provisions of Alfred No-
bel's will, the Swedish Acaderny assumed responsibility for an enterprise
that rnight well have failed or else been disrnissed on all sides as a relic of
Scandinavian provincialism; since the announcement of the first prize in
1901, however, the Acaderny'sjudgments have met instead with remark-
able and uninterrupted approval. Over time, its juries managed not only
to establish themselves as arbiters of literary legitimacy but also to pre-
serve their rnonopoly on worldwide literary consecration. 52
The importance of the prize in helping to accumulate a national
stock ofliterary capital is now so great that South Korea has mounted a
campaign on behalfofits writers. The country's press speaks of"the ob-
session with the Nobel," and in the largest bookstore in Seoul one sees
authors advertised as "the future Korean Nobel Prize winner."53 There
is even talk of creating a review exclusively devoted to pursuit of the
prize. 54 The official candidate, Pak Kyong-ni (b. 1927), author of the irn-
rnensely popular roman-fleuve T)oji (Land, 16 vols., 1969-1994), is a
monumental figure.
Chinese writers, who have long found thernselves shut off from the
literary world in a state of quasi-autarky, met a few years ago to decide
upon a national strategy aimed at presenting candidates and winning at
least one prize by the end of the century. One of them was quoted in
the Swedish press as protesting: "Among the thousands of writers in a
The Pabric <?fthe Universal 1 147

Chinese population of alrnost a billion people, not one has won the N o-
bel Prize!"55 The prize awarded in 2000 to a Chinese dissident living in
France, Gao Xingjian, orùy very partially satisfied these dernands: the
first Nobel honoring a Chinese-Ianguage writer went to an exile and a
French citizen. It hardly cornes as a surprise, then, that China does not
regard it as evidence of national recognition.
The sense of entitlement to the Nobel Prize in Literature has taken a
sirnilar form in the Portuguese-speaking world. Jorge Amado addressed
the rnatter in an interview not long ago:
1 think that a Nobel is owed to the Portuguese language, which has

never had a single Nobel Prize. Not that 1 think that the Nobel makes
literature: it is writers who make the Nobel and not the Nobel that
makes writers. But 1 find it sad that a man su ch as Guimaràes Rosa
should have died without having won the Nobel Prize, that Carlos
Drummond de Andrade [and other] great Portuguese writers should
-have died without winning the Nobel. There is in Portugal a man
eighty and sorne years of age who is a great Portuguese poet, named
Miguel Torga, who is a thousand times deserving of the Nobel and
who has not received it. This is to be deplored. But my opinion counts
for nothing in ail of this. Personaily, it doesn't matter to me at ail, 1 can
assure yoU. 56
The Nobel awarded to the Portuguese novelist José Saramago in I998

served to remedy this injustice. 57
Having put itself in the difficult position of acting as an impartial tribu-

nal whose judgments will be universally accepted as legitimate, the
Academy finds itself forced to rigorously establish standards of criteria of
literary excellence and to operùy acknowledge the consequences for the
unification of world literary space of supporting international writers in
their struggles with national writers. lndeed, the history of the prize
since its inception can be seen as an ongoing attempt to develop explicit
standards of universality. Within the Nobel committee itself, the orny re-
ally decisive disagreements have been over the endorsenlent or rejection
of this or that criterion for awarding the prize. 58 The effect of the com-
rnittee's work over the past century has been to broaden the prevailing
conceptions of literary universality, which have been enriched at each
stage by the prior deliberations of the rnembers of the Acaderny.

In the early years the governing criteria were political, refiecting the
U10St heteronornous notions ofliterary value. Thus the first definition of
legitiulate literary art, a quite minimal one, identified it with political
neutrality, a sort ofjuste milieu devised before the war of 1914-1918 as a
counterweight to the nationalist "excesses" of the literature of the day
and, above all, out of respect for the perceived necessity of exercising
diplOluatic caution. A perfect illustration of this conception is the inter-
est shown by the jury in 1914 in the candidacy of the Swiss-and there~
fore supposedly neutral-writer Carl Spitteler (in the event the prize
was awarded to hirn only after the war, in 1919). Two decades later, in
1939, the acadenlY's circumspect deference to the "ideal of peace" up-
held by Alfred Nobel in his will establishing the prize produced the
saUle situation. Only three candidates were considered that year, all of
theul frorn neutral countries: Hermann Hesse, a nationalized Swiss; F. E.
Sillanpaa, a Finn; and Johan Huizinga, a Dutchman. This ideal-whose
political character is proof of the jury's relative lack of autonorny in the
early years-was set up as a suprerrle artistic value, the embodiment of
reason and rnoderation. It found its literary equivalent logically enough
in what Nobel in his will called "idealisul," initially interpreted by the
prize conlmittee as a sort of aesthetic acadernicism privileging "bal-
ance," "harulOny," and "pure and noble ideas" in narrative art. 59
Beginning in the 192os, however, in arder to free itself from a con-
ception that was felt to be too closely associated with political events,
the AcadeulY sought to promote another sort of neutrality. Henceforth
works deserving of the Nobel Prize--of being universalized-were
stipulated to be ones whose national character was neither too pro-
nounced nor tao much insisted upon. Quite early on, then, literary ex-
cellence was seen as being incoulpatible with what might be called cul-
tural nationalislu. Already in 1915 the cornnùttee had proposed the
candidacy of the Spanish writer Benito Pérez Gald6s (1843-1920) on
the grounds that he "presents hirnself as the supporter not of a party but
of general patriotism" and that there is "sonlething typical" about his
characters that "luakes therrl rrlOre cornprehensible to those readers not
farniliar with Spanish characteristics." ln 1929, by contrast, the candidacy
of the Gerrnan poet Arno Holz (1863-1929) was challenged on the
ground that his work was "too German": "here we have a purely Ger-
man affair ... the conunittee has not found his poetry of sufficient uni-
versaI interest." The prize awarded to Anatole France in 1921 may be
The Pabric afthe Urziversal 1 I49

understood in the sarne sense, only now no longer in the name of politi-
cal neutrality but of active engagement against nationalisrn and anti-
semitism: "In the Dreyfils affair he stood in the front rank of those who
defended justice against misguided chauvinism."60
A third criterion, advanced a little bit later, built in another dimen-
sion: the public reception of a work. The first sign of the suc cess of the
prize, and its echo throughout the world, was that universality was now
interpreted as unanimity. From now on a work worthy of the Nobel had
to be accessible to the broadest possible audience. Thus Paul Valéry was
eliminated frorn consideration in 1930 because the committee felt un-
able "to recornmend for the universally intended Nobel prize a poetry
so exclusive and inaccessible."61 This submission of literary judgment to
the taste of the greatest number heralded the formation of a third pole
essential for understanding the structure of the world field, namely eco-
nomic forces, which were strengthened by the emergence of powerful
national markets.
Iù addition to these competing criteria, there was pressure at each
stage of the progressive enlargement of the literary universe, from the
beginning of the century onward, to recognize the international dimen-
sion of universality. Opening the field to new contestants, which is to say
to new types of literary capital, was do ne only with great reluctance.
Precisely because it touched the very foundations of the literary ideol-
ogy on which the Nobel Prize had been built, the need to devise
new criteria in order to break free of the academy's European-centered
definition ofliterature was long resisted.
The first attempt to move beyond Europe, a considerable one, came
early, with the awarding of the prize in 1913 to Rabindranath Tagore,
the great Bengali-speaking Indian poet. The presence among the laure-
ates on the eve of the First World War of an author frorn a colonized
country would appear to be a clear sign of great daring and extraordi-
nary independence of mind on the part of the Swedish Academy, were it
not for the fact that this unexpected honor was actually the result of in-
grained prejudice reinforced by colonial narcissism. Tagore had not been
recommended to the committee by a fellow Indian; instead he was pro-
posed by a rnember of the Royal Society ofLiterature in London, solely
on the basis of an English version of the Gitanjali (partially translated by
Tagore himself). 62
The United States did not rnake its entry until almost two de cades

later, with the award of the prize to Sinclair Lewis in 1930 (followed by
Eugene O'Neill in 1936 and Pearl Buck in 1938); but it was considered,
not unreasonably, as a European offshoot. Similarly, it was not until 1945
that the Latin branch of American literature was recognized. The award
of the prize that year to the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral arnounted to
little more than lip service to the idea of a genuinely worldwide litera-
ture, however, crowning as it did a very traditional body of work closely
associated with European rnodels. Only with the ho no ring in 1967 of
the Guatelnalan writer Miguel Angel Asturias was there any real aware-
ness of the novelty of the Latin American novel and of the break with
older forms that it represented. With these two exceptions, the prize re--
mained the exclusive province ofEuropeans and Americans during this
entire period. Then in 1968 the Nobel cornmittee suddenly turned to
the Far East, awarding the prize to Yasunari Kawabata, who, the judges
noted in their citation, "with great sensibility expresses the essence of
the ]apanese mind."63 Yet it was to be another two decades before the
first African and Arab writers were recognized: Wole Soyinka, in 1986;
and Naguib Mahfouz, in I988.
The dominant position of the Nobel Prize in the pyrarnid ofliterary
recognition and publication is the outstanding feature of a systeln that
pernlanently accords the work of European authors a central position
while relegating to the periphery everything that conles frolTl other
parts of the world. 64 Although the problem of internationalizing the
prize presented itself fairly early on, in the I920S (Tagore having only
been an apparent exception in I9 l 3), for many years nothing really
changed. When the Nobel conmuttee has dared to venture into the
non-Western literary world-until quite recently a rare event-its ex-
plorations have exactly coincided with the stages by which the world of
letters has COlTle to be enlarged.
For this reason the choice of Gao Xingjian in 2000 is an interesting
development. It signaIs, to be sure, the openness of the comrnittee to a
new linguistic and cultural area-an imrnense and, until then, com-
pletely neglected area-but it is also fully in agreernent with the defini-
tion of literary autonOlny current at the Greenwich meridian. Gao is
not, as the international press would have it, a political dissident. He is a
literary dissident who long ago broke with the prevailing norms of his
literary universe. A playwright, literary critic, and painter as well as a
novelist, he has also translated into Chinese sorne of the greatest figures
TIte Pabric of the Universal 1 151

in rnodern French literature--Michaux, Ponge, Perec, the Surrealist po-
ets. He is, finally, the author of a critical essay on the techniques of the
rnodern novel, published in Beijing in 1981, which provoked great con-
troversy in Chinese literary circles. 65 By making use ofWestern literary
innovations and techniques and referring to the aesthetic norrns of the
literary present (which, owing to his knowledge of French, he was able
surreptitiously to discover),66 Gao encouraged the formation of an un-
precedented position of autonomy in his native land-a country where
literature is alrnost entirely instrurnentalized and subject to censorship.
Gao is, in other words, the incarnation of what earlier 1 called an in-
ternational writer. Having sought refuge in France in 1988 and become
a naturalized French citizen ten years later, he is rnuch rnore than simply
a Chinese--Ianguage novelist exiled in the West; he is also one of the first
to have nlanaged to recreate his own tradition using nontraditional
farms. His rnagnificent novel Ling Shan (Soul Mountain), begun in
China in 1982 and finished in France in 1989, is thus at once a rnanifesto
of formaI liberty and a precise evocation of traditional China. 67 Far from
crowning a "national" oeuvre that refiects a conternporary Chinese his-
tory and milieu, the Nobel Cornmittee honored a genuinely autono-
mous body of work that, by integrating the norms ofliterary modernity
(inevitablyWestern, given the configuration of literary power relations
today), has been able to reconceive, in the Chinese language, the forms
of an older Chinese literature. In no way, then, can the Nobel committee
be said to have Inade a political or diplomatic choice. Its decision in this
case was truly free, literary, and literarily courageous.
The various criteria governing the acadelny's selections did not in
fact emerge in strict succession, one after the other. Instead they co-
existed and jointly evolved over tinle-occasionally even reasserting
thernselves, just when they were thought to have been rejected, in the
defense of a particular work. The fourth and final definition of univer-
sality was laid down after 1945, when the Acadelny announced its inten-
tion to include "pioneers ofliterary art" among the list ofhonorees. The
criterion of the greatest nurnber was set aside and in its place a sort of
pantheon of the avant-garde and "future classics" was established, her-
al ding a period of remarkable critical activity on the part of the Nobel
selection cornrnittees. It was rather as though, due consideration having
at last been given to innovation in literary art, the universality decreed

and upheld by the Swedish judges was now constructed in opposition to
the conservative influence of national academies, on the one hand, and
to the rrlOst leveling conceptions of literary appeal on the other. Thus
T. S. Eliot was elected in 1948 "for his outstanding, pioneer contribu-
tion to present-day poetry"; Faulkner won the prize the foilowing year,
recognized by the jury as "the great experirnentalist arnong twentieth
century novelists," though he was still very little known to the general
public (and almost unknown in his own country).68 Sarrmel Beckett re-
ceived it in 1969 for an exceptionally original body of work that was
then far from finished. Other innovators were to foilow, arnong them
Pablo Neruda in 1971, Eugenio Montale in 1975, Jaroslav Seifert in
1984, Claude Simon in 1985, and Dario Fo in 1997.
This new degree of autonomy carne about as a result of the structural
cornplementarity obtaining between the Nobel Prize and the power of
consecration enj oyed by Paris. In effect, the Acaderny affirmed (or reaf-
firmed) the verdicts of the capital of literature and, as it were, grounded
thern in law: by making these decisions official, the Swedish Academy--
with few exceptions at least through the 1960s-endorsed, ratifie d, and
made public the judgments of Paris, consecrating those writers who had
been discovered and promoted by its publishers and critics. TestifYing to
this state of affairs is not only the large number of French authors on the
list of winners (France remains the rnost regularly honored nation, with
twelve prizes-fourteen if one includes Beckett, officiaily counted as an
Irish national, and Gao Xingjian) but also, and above ail, the prizes
awarded to Faulkner, Helningway, Asturias, and Garda Marquez, ail of
whom were first discovered and celebrated in France. Approval by the
literary authorities of Paris (rivaIed, of course, by their counterparts in
London, who managed to achieve recognition for many of their own
authors-Kipling, Tagore, Yeats, Shaw, and so on) has long been an es-
sential first step in presenting oneself as a candidate for the highest and
the most international award in the world ofliterature. Sartre's refusaI to
accept the Nobel in 1964 supplies additional evidence of the redun-
dancy of Swedish recognition in the aftermath of consecration by Paris.
He was one of the few persons in world literary space who, as a central
figure in the capital, and one who himselfhad already been honored to
an extraordinary degree, could do without the prize, a circumstance that
only reaffirmed his erninent position.
The Pabric of the Universal 1 l 53

ETHNOCENTRISMS
The authority of the great literary capitals is not unambiguous, however.
The power to evaluate and transmute a text into literature is also, and al-
most inevitably, exerted according to the norms of those who judge. It
involves two things that are inseparably linked: celebration and annex-
ation. Together they form a perfect example of what might be called
Parisianization, or universalization through denial of difference. The
great consecrating nations reduce foreign works of literature to their
own categories of perception, which they rrristake for universal norms,
while neglecting all the elernents of historical, cultural, political, and es-
pecially literary context that make it possible to properly and fully ap-
preciate such works. In so doing they exact a sort of octroi tax on the
right to universal circulation. As a result, the history of literary cele-
bration amounts to a long series of misunderstandings and misinterpre-
tations that have their roots in the ethnocentrisrrl of the dominant au-
tho.rities (notably those in Paris) and in the rnechanism. of annexation
(by which works from outlying areas are subordinated to the aesthetic,
historical, political, and formaI categories of the center) that operates
through the very act of literary recognition. 69 Translation therefore
stands revealed as an ambiguous enterprise as well: on the one hand, it is
a me ans of obtaining official entry to the republic ofletters; and, on the
other, it is a way of systematically imposing the categories of the center
upon works from the periphery, even of unilaterally deciding the mean-
ing of such works. In this sense the notion of universality is one of the
rnost diabolical inventions of the center, for in denying the antagonistic
and hierarchical structure of the world, and proclairrring the equality of
all the citizens of the republic of Ietters, the lTIonopolists of universality
corrlmand others to subrrrit to their law. Universality is what they--and
they alone-declare to be acceptable and accessible to all.
The full extent of the ambiguity associated with the process of conse-
cration is magnificently condensed in the story ofhow James Joyce's tal-
ent carne to be recognized by Valery Larbaud. The special attention paid
to Joyce by the high literary authorities of Paris aroused the ire of an
Irish critic named Ernest Boyd, who violently attacked Larbaud for
his "colossal ignorance of Irish literature" and his "cOlTIplete ignorance
of the great Anglo-Irish writers," among whOlTI he mentioned Synge,
George Moore, and YeatsJO Citing Larbaud's 1921 lecture, in which he
asserted that "to write in Irish would be as though a contemporary

French author were to write in modern Breton,"71 Boyd took the
French critic to task-rightly so in this case-for misunderstanding the
nationalliterary revival in lreland and interpreted his remarks as an at-
tack on the identity of Irish literature and its distinctive place among the
literatures of the English-speaking worldJ2 To this declaration of na-
tional interest, Larbaud merrlOrably replied: "lt is not at all by chance or
on account of a whim or sorne ill-considered enthusiasrn that, having
gained entrance to this roorn filled with treasures, Ulysses, 1 set about
making it known to the elite of French letters ... My sole merit is to
have been the first outside the English dOlluin to say without hesitation
that James Joyce is a great writer and Ulysses a very great book, and this
at a rrlOment when nobody in Ire/and had said it."73 Here, in one of their
very rare direct encounters, one sees the battle between the national
view of literature and the dehistoricizing irnpulse-and through this
the annexation effected by French consecration, which, although it
unarguably served to ennoble, internationalize, and universalize, at the
sarne time ignored everything that rrlade the emergence of such a work
possible. Paris, the denationalized capital of literature, denationalized
texts so that they would conform to its own conceptions ofliterary art.
ln the sarne way, by variously interpreting the work of Franz Kafka
in metaphysical, psychoanalytical, aesthetic, religious, social, or political
terms, critics in the center (many of thelll in Paris) give evidence of a
specifie fornl of blindness: through an almost deliberate ignorance of
history, they make themselves vulnerable to anachronistic readings that
reveal the structural ethnocentrism of the literary world. Marthe Rob-
ert, who was one of the first to propose a historical analysis of Kafk:a's
work, has rnagnificently summarized the thoroughgoing dehistorici-
zation practiced by Parisian critics:
Since Kafka appeared to be exempt from ail geographical and histori-

cal influence, there was no hesitation in adopting him-one might al-
most say "naturalizing" him, for indeed there was a sort of pro cess of
naturalization at work that gave birth to a French Kafka, nearer to us,
to be sure, but no longer having anything more th an a distant relation
to the true [Kafka] ... Since Kafka no longer retained any trace ofhis
actual origins, beyond the fact that he was a human being like anyone
else, he came quite naturaily to be accorded a sort of right of extrater-
ritoriality, thanks to which his person and his work (in exchange, it is
true, for their real existence) ended up being granted a degree of per-
The Pabric of the Universal 1 l 55

fection and purity enjoyed only by abstract things. This right of extra-
territoriality was at bottom a heavenly privilege: coming from no-
where and belonging to everyone, Kafka quite naturally gave the
impression of having fallen from the sky, even to French writers and
critics, who were the least inclined to look upward in search of a
higher standard. 74
More recently, the critical benediction bestowed upon Patrick

Charnoiseau and Raphaël Confiant-the Martinican novelists of "Cre-
oleness"-has dernonstrated the power of consecration by the center to
depoliticize politically dominated writers, preventing them from formu-
lating political or national dernands. Su ch recognition is at once a nec es-
sary fornl of autonomy and a forrn of ethnocentric annexation that de-
nies the historical existence of those who are consecrated. Thus the
Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe took issue with the American critic
Charles R. Larson,75 who claimed to be able to discern the universal
cha-l'acter of a Garnbian novel solely on the ground that, certain substitu-
tions having been rnade, it could easily pass for a work by an Arnerican
author:
Does it ever occur to these [academics] to try out their game of

changing names of characters and places in an American novel, say, a
Philip Roth or an Updike, and slotting in African names just to see
how it works? But of course it would not occur to them. It would
never occur to them to doubt the universality of their own literature.
In the nature of things the work of a Western writer is automatically
informed by universality. It is only others who must strain to achieve it
... 1 should like to see the word "universal" banned altogether from
discussions of African literature until such time as people cease to use
it as a synonym for the narrow, self-serving parochialism of Europe,
until their horizon extends to include all the world. 76
In arder to achieve literary recognition, dominated writers must

therefore yield to the norms decreed to be universal by the very persons
who have a monopoly on universality. More than this, they need to situ-
ate thernselves at just the right distance from their judges: if they wish to
be noticed, they have to show that they are different from other writ-
ers-but not so different that they are thereby rendered invisible. They
must be neither too near nor too far. Ail writers frorn countries under
the linguistic dornination of France have had this experience. Charles

Ferdinand Rarrmz, for example, remained imperceptible so long as he
tried to appear as though he belonged to the world of French letters; it
was only after he proclairned his separateness as a Swiss writer frorn the
canton of Vaud that he was recognized. In a letter to his publisher, Ber-
nard Grasset, he summed up the problem perfectly: "It is the fate of rny
country, everything considered, to be at once too sirnilar and too differ-
ent, too close and yet not close enough-to be too French or not
enough; for either one ignores it, or, wh en one knows it, one no longer
knows quite what to make of it."77 It is precisely this inherent ethno-
centrism that pro duces aIl literary exoticisrns. In an article devoted to
the Spanish writer Rarnon Gornez de la Serna, published in the Nouvelle
Revue Française in 1924,Jean Cassou lucidly analyzed the principal nùs-
takes made by the French critical authorities: "We ask foreigners to sur-
prise us, but in a manner we are almost prepared to indicate to them, as if
their role were to serve, on behalf of their race, our pleasure."78
French Canadians had already understood this difficulty by the late
nineteenth century. As the poet Octave Crérrlazie pointedly observed:
If we spoke Huron or lroquoian, the works of our writers would at-

tract the attention of the Old World. This virile and muscular lan-
guage, born in the forests of America, has that raw poetry of the wil-
derness about it that delights the foreigner. One would swoon over a
novel or a poem translated from lroquoian while not troubling oneself
to read a book written in French by a colonist of Quebec or Mon-
treal. For two decades now, translations have been published every year
in France of Russian, Scandinavian, and Romanian novels. Supposing
these same books were written in French, they would not find fifty
readers."79
IBSEN IN ENGLAND AND IN FRANCE

The translation, interpretation, and consecration oflbsen's work in Eng-
land and France furnish a superb example of the different ways in wmch
an author's work may be annexed by two literary capitals having dis-
crepant interests in embracing it. The contrary significance attached to
Ibsen's plays in London and Paris-seen as models of realisrn on one side
of the Channel, of Syrnbolism on the other-shows that the consecra-
tion of a work is always an appropriation, a diversion ofliterary capital.
Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) stands out as a central figure in European
literary history between 1890 and 1920. Having almost in spite ofhim-
The Pabric ~f the Universal 1 157

self become the synlbol of rnodernity in European drarna, Ibsen was
read and performed in theaters throughout the world on the basis of di-
arnetricaily opposed interpretations corresponding to the literary and
aesthetic categories of those who consecrated hirn. Every director or
critic pretending to have special understanding of Ibsen's plays, whose
fonn and subject matter represented a considerable departure frorn the
conventions of European theater at the time, used theln for his own
purposes and in ways that depended on the position he occupied in his
own national literary space. Far frorn serving the author by presenting
his work to audiences on its own tenns, as ail "discoverers" profess to do,
directors and critics took advantage of Ibsen's relative weakness as a for-
eigner uninitiated in localliterary politics in order to Inodify his work in
ways that strengthened their own reputation.
This is why Ibsen was able to be interpreted in England, particularly
by George Bernard Shaw, as a realist addressing concrete social problerns
in a novel fashion, and in France during the same years as a Synlbolist
conveying univers al poetic insights. The characteristic ethnocentrism of
these two great literary nations-particularly in the case of France and
its interrnediaries, who were especially blind to the historical conditions
surrounding the appearance of literary works-acted upon a distinctive
set of national preoccupations in each case to produce quite different
patterns of consecration and annexation.
Ibsen was one of the leading figures of a nationalliterary nlOvernent that

sought independence not only from Danish domination, which Nor-
way had endured for four centuries, but also from German tutelage,
which rnore recently had provincialized its inteilectuallife. Literary de-
bate in Norway in the mid-nineteenth century centered on the creation
of a new language, based on the dialects of the western rural parts of the
country, which was supposed to be more truly national to the extent
that it was further removed from Dano-Norwegian, the consequence of
Danish colonization. The Landsmal, or "country language" (known to-
day as Nynorsk, or "new Norwegian"), which was brought into exis-
tence through the efforts of inteilectuals and writers, soon won approval
as a second official language alongside Riksmal, the "state language"
(currently called Bokmal, or "book language"). It enlbodied a style of
national rornanticisnl that was largely inherited from Germany and that,
in putting rural traditions at the heart of aesthetic concerns, was to guide

the new literature during the 1840S and 18 50S. Following the exarnple
of the brothers Grimrn, Norwegian folklorists traveled the country in
search of popular songs, tales, legends, and ballads. In 1862 Ibsen himself
set out into the northern provinces to gather folk material, and his first
plays testified to a desire to free N orwegian letters frorn the domination
of foreign models.
Before Ibsen there had been no N orwegian theater. He was deter-
mined to combat German intellectual influence, which up until then
had made Norway a docile province of Germany, by turning its own
weapons against it. In this connection Peer Gynt (1867)-written in
verse using two different meters, one of which copied the style of medi-
eval ballads, and aimed at settling accounts with an outrnoded patriotism
while drawing upon the resources of popuIar narrative and the Roman-
tic mood of the time-represented at once the highpoint and the end of
this early period of his work. Ibsen boldly declared his intention to op-
pose Norwegian conformism and narrow-mindedness-to "awaken the
people and lead them to take a large view of the world."80
Although he had Ieft his native land severaI years earlier, embarking
upon a period of exile that was to last twenty-seven years, Peer Gynt was
a national success. Immediately afterward Ibsen began work on a play
that marked a turning point in his career: De unges Forbund (The League
ofYouth, 1869), a conternporary work in prose written in imitation of
the French style associated with Eugène Scribe and Alexandre Dumas
fils, then considered the great rnasters of drama. During the following
decade, the modernism (Gennembrud) that had been championed first in
Denmark by Georg Brandes in his /Esthetiske Studier (Aesthetic Studies,
1868) brought about an aesthetic and political revolution in all of the
Scandinavian countries. In the same year that Brandes' book appeared,
Ibsen was composing The League of Youth-a play that affirrned his de-
termination to introduce realisrIl into the theater and henceforth to use
French literary tools for the purpose of devising a distinctively Norwe-
gian style freed from German constraints and control.
Ibsen in England
Ibsen's plays were translated in England well before they were in France.
A volume of selected writings was published in 1879, and the following
year the drama critic William Archer published his first translations. The
earliest productions went unnoticed. But in 1889 Et Dukkehjem (A

Doll's House, r879) was weil received; and two years later, in r89r,
Gengangere (Ghosts, r88r) and Hedda Gabler (r890) caused a scandaI. The
following year Bygmester Solness (The Master Builder) was panned by
the critics. A group of marginal figures opposed to the dominant theater
of the day-anl0ng thenl George Bernard Shaw, then a young critic-
nonetheless sought to pronl0te the Norwegian's work. The two rnain
pillars of English avant-garde theater at this tüne were the Independent
Theatre Society, which had been founded in r 89 r by Jacob Thornas
Grein on the rnodel of Antoine's Théâtre-Libre in Paris as a showcase
for new European playwrights and whose first production (of Ghosts)
aroused storrns of protest; and the Court (now Royal Court) Theatre,
directed between r904 and r907 by Harley Granville-Barker, a play-
wright and friend of Shaw who staged Ibsen's plays and sought to
achieve canonical status for the works of Shakespeare, then considered a
subversive author, through the creation of a national theater. Shaw gave
hi~ first plays to the Court Theatre, where he enjoyed his first great pop-
ular success in r904 with)ohn Bull's Other Island. Opposed both politi-
cally and aesthetically to the reigning forms of theater in London, which
were still nurked by Victorian propriety, Shaw saw Ibsen as the stan-
dardbearer of a new style of drama-an argurnent he had developed sev-
eral years earlier in The Quintessence cd'Ibsenism (r90r).
Just as Wagner was Shaw's musical hero, Ibsen was his teacher in the
theater. 81 An obscure music critic who had set out penniless from his
native Dublin in r 876, at the age of twenty, Shaw relied on Ibsen's ethi-
cal and aesthetic example in attempting to overcorne the inertia of the
London stage at the tüne. The absence of social criticisnl and the stale
repetition of acadernic forrns and genres led him to write, for example,
in r889: "This year there was a rivival of hope because Mr Pinero ...
walked cautiously up to a social problem, touched it, and ran away.82
Shortly afterwards a much greater sensation was created by a N orwegian
play, Ibsen's Doll's House) in which the dramatist handled this same prob-
lenl, and shewed, not how it ought to be solved, but how it is about to
be solved."83
The analogy that Shaw continually pressed between Wagner and Ib-
sen is eXplained not only by the similarity of their positions as heretical
foreigners, which enabled thern to underrnine the timid confonnism of
the artistic world in Britain, but also by the similar sorts of contempt
r60 1 THE WORLD REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

that they aroused in English critics. Ibsen, Shaw wrote, "was treated
worse thanWagner, though that seemed impossible. It was, however,
easy. We had at least not accusedWagner of obscenity, nor called for the
prosecution ofHer Majesty's Theatre as a disorderly house after the first
perforrnance of Lohengrin ... we assured the English nation that [Ibsen]
was an illiterate, diseased, half-crazy pornographer, and wanted to perse-
cute the people who performed his plays in spite of the prohibition of
the Censor."84
Shaw's situation as an Irishrnan living in England rnade him highly
sensitive to the problerns faced by an author frorn a country on the pe-
riphery of the European literary world whose provincialism prevented
its artists from being noticed. Thus on the occasion of the London pre-
rniere of Peer Gynt (set to music by Grieg) in London in r889, Shaw
called attention to both the first signs of international recognition of
N orwegian culture and the hegemonic instincts of the English, who
were able to appreciate foreign works only in terms of their own cul-
tural assumptions:
Even the general public is beginning to understand that the Norwe-
gian people are not simply a poor and wretched lot whose land is
prized as a refuge for wealthy foreign hunters and fishermen. They are
also commencing to be thought of as a people with a vast modern lit-
erature and a remarkably interesting political history. Shakespear's su-
premacy in our own literature has long led us to believe that there is
one great dramatist who dominates each national literature.We are
used to the idea of one central figure, around whom ail the others
group themselves. Therefore we are intensely interested in each new
word about that "modern Shakespear" looming in Scandinavia-
Henrik Ibsen. 85
Shaw's subversive political views, which led him to adopt realisrn and
naturalism as rnethods of social criticism in challenging the aesthetic and
moral closed-rnindedness of the English theater, together with the In-
dependent Theatre's acknowledged debt to Antoine's Théâtre-Libre,
which was famously associated with Zola, therefore encouraged a "so-
cial" interpretation of Ibsen's work by members of the English avant-
garde-the only interpretation, they fdt, that was capable of doing jus-
tice to both its novelty and its modernity while also remaining fairly
close to the modernist aims of the N orwegian dramatist.

Ibsen in France
Ibsen was very quickly co-opted by the avant-garde theater in France as
weIl, but there the configuration of aesthetic positions was so different
that his work was to be interpreted in almost opposite ternIS. Ibsen be-
carne a central issue in the quarrels of the theatrical world in Paris, dis-
putes that grew out of the conflict between the Théâtre-Libre, which
aligned itself with the naturalist movernent, then in decline, and the
Théâtre de l'Oeuvre, created by Lugné-Poë in opposition to Antoine in
1893, which sought to promote the rising Symbolist movement.
It was Antoine who first staged Ibsen, beginning with Ghosts in 1890
and Vildanden (The Wild Duck, 1884) the foIlowing year. Zola's name
was frequently mentioned by critics looking to characterize the aes-
thetic temperament of the N orwegian dramatist. 86 But Lugné-Poë, in
order to establish his position as an innovator and to assert a different set
of aesthetic preferences, turned Ibsen into a Symbolist. His production
in Decernber 1892 of Fruenfra Havet (The Lady from the Sea, 1884) in-
augurated a new style of acting, solernn and monotone, whose emphasis
on speaking lines slowly-which had the effect of making the text seem
unreal-represented a striking departure frorn conventional practice.
The heroine, played by an actress known for her roles in Maeterlinck's
dramas, was transformed into a "strange creature with long veils, a white
ghost."87 The play was a critical success. Ibsen, impatient to become
known at last in Paris-the "real heart of the world," as he called it88-
reluctantly accepted the Symbolist interpretation as the price of fame
while continuing to insist on the right to review translations ofhis work
and the details of their perforrnance.
During the summer of l 894, Lugné-Poë took his company on tour in
Sweden, Denrnark, and Norway to introduce Maeterlinck and Symbol-
ist drama to the Scandinavian public and to show Ibsen's countrymen
how he was performed in France. Though the troupe's arrival was hailed
as "an event in the national theater movement," its interpretation of Ib--
sen's work was widely resisted. 89 Yet if the "rnissionary of Symbolisrn"
failed to convert Scandinavian audiences, the critics, knowing that the
Théâtre de l'Oeuvre was a first step to recognition in Paris, approved the
French "naturalization" of Ibsen-aIl except Georg Brandes, who, in an
article published in 1897, openly expressed exasperation with Lugné-
Poë's approach: "It is not only in France," he wrote, "that there has de-
veloped too great a fondness for finding symbols in the rnost human

characters of N orwegian drarnas ... But France does take the prize for
these hntastic interpretations."90 Ibsen himself seerned to qualify his
support.
The next year, in r895, Lugné-Poë organized a tour ofEngland, put-
ting on plays by Maeterlinck and Ibsen in a srnall theater in London at
Grein's invitation. The passionate interest in the work of the Belgian
playwright shown by the decadent young poets of the capital, admirers
of Oscar Wilde, excited the disapproval of Victorian opinion and, with
the start a few days later ofWilde's first trial, encouraged bitter attacks
from opponents of innovation in the theater. Nor had Mirabeau's refer-
ence to Maeterlinck five years before as the "Belgian Shakespeare" gone
unnoticed-another instance of the syndrorne experienced by Ibsen
and described earlier by Shaw hirnself: in which foreign authors were
interpreted with reference to the categories of English literary history.
But Shaw, Ibsen's introducer in England along withWilliarn Archer, de-
fended the approach adopted by the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre, acknowledg-
ing the reservations of other critics (who criticized "the shabbiness of
the scenery" and "the petty parochial squabblings which stand for public
life in Ibsen's prose comedies") while yet praising "the true atmosphere
of this most enthralling of ail Ibsen's works rising like an enchanted mist
for the first time on an English stage."91
These differences in interpretation make it clear that authors from the
periphery are able to ob tain recognition in the leading capitals only at
the cost of seeing their work appropriated by the literary establishment
for its own purposes. In the case of Ibsen, the arbitrary character of the
French reading-French critics go on even today imperturbably talking
about his Synlbolisnl, sirnply repeating the familiar readings of the pre-
vious century-can be understood only by looking at the dominant
categories of artistic and critical understanding from an international
perspective, thereby restoring their full complexity.
The Pabric afthe Universal 1 r63

5 1 F'ram Internatianalism
ta Glabalizatian
English words expressing several, although by no means ail aspects of poshlust are for in-
stance: "cheap, sham, common, smutty, pink-and-blue, high falutin', in bad taste" ... Litera-
ture is one of the best breeding places ... Poshlust, it should be repeated, is especially vigor-
ous and vicious when the sham is not obvious and when the values that it mimics are
considered, rightly or wrongly, to belong to the very highest level of art, thought or emotion.
It is those books which are 50 poshlustily reviewed in the literary supplement of daily pa-
pers-the best sellers, the "stirring, profound and beautiful" novels; ... Poshlust is not only
the obviously trashy but also the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever,
the falsely attractive ... For in the kingdom of poshlust it is not the book that "makes a tri-
umph" but the "reading public" which laps it up, blurb and ail.
-Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol
THE CONFIGURATION OF contemporary literary space is not easy to charac-

terize. It may be that we find ourselves today in a transitional phase, pass-
ing from a world dominated by Paris to a polycentric and plural world
in which London and New York, chiefiy, but also to a lesser degree
Rome, Barcelona, and Frankfurt, among other centers, contend with
Paris for hegemony.
By the end of the nineteenth century, fierce struggles between
emerging powers, each with its own stock ofliterary capital, had already
made the "decline" of Paris an obligatory therne. 1 Since the authority of
a center exists, in its objective effècts, only in and through the belief that
individuals have in it, Paris' loss of preerninence could be announced in
the guise of an objective observation. Rejections of the established order
are in fact violent attempts to seize literary power. The place of Paris in
the world ofletters remains a subject of passionate dispute, on which ev-
eryone has a settled opinion. For my part, 1 can only try to suggest ways
in which recent developrnents rnay be understood, without thereby pre-
tending to be indifferent about so controversial a question, especiaily as
the author of a book devoted to exarnining the efforts and exploits of ail
those who have sought to manufacture universality, as it were, and who
today find their authority increasingly threatened.
Thus in the rivaIt)' that now opposes Paris to other European capitals
and above ail to London and New York, it is difficult to nlake observa-
tions that are not seen as expressions of partisan sentirnent and therefore
used as weapons in the competition among them. The rnost the analyst
can do is to refuse such observations the status of truth that they clairn
for themselves, and instead show how they are used and catalogue their
effectiveness. Today, for example, atterrlpts rnade in rnany parts of the lit-
erary world to instiil doubt in the minds of the authorities in Paris as to
the suprernacy of French literature have succeeded so weil that the
theme of decline, unimaginable only a few years ago in France itself, has
become an almost inevitable feature of local debate, to the point that it
now appears even in French novels. In the second part of this book 1
shail describe these attempts and, by restoring them to the context of the
worldwide space that produced thelu, try as far as possible to avoid the
myopia inherent in the Parisian view of the world ofletters, which mis-
takenly regards the results of international competition as a series of sep-
arate national realities.
In the lueantime, however, a few facts wiil show that the situation is
still more cOluplex than it may at first SeelTI. From the point of view of
the tacit recognition produced by the simple rnechanisn1 of literary
credit, French literary power remains important in the United States in
the form of philosophy or, more precisely, of a philosophy whose style
and content are derived from literature and whose dissernination has
been assisted by the literary authority and prestige of France. Recent
French philosophy and, rnore generaily, outstanding figures of French
inteilectual life such as Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, and Lyotard
were first introduced to the United States through the literature and for-
eign-language departments of American universities such as Yale and
From Intemationalis11l to Globalization 1 165

Johns Hopkins. And if the ITlethod of "deconstruction" developed by
Derrida, the therne of "power knowledge" elaborated by Foucault, the
"minor literatures" described by Deleuze, and the "postmodernity" ana-
lyzed by Lyotard have powerfully influenced Arnerican campuses and, in
particular, the field of cultural studies, this once again has been due to
literary studies and criticisrn. Nor can the littérisation of philosophy be
seen as illegitimate in the cases of these and other authors, for their work
is deeply concerned with literature and readily enlists it in the service of
philosophical inquiry. The weight of France in American intellectual
life is yet another ettect-indirect, to be sure, disguised, even paradoxi-
cal-of its literary credit, which no doubt at least partly accounts for the
violence of the attacks against these sanle figures in Arnerica.
The recent recognition of major writers such as Danilo Kis (a Serb) , Mi-
lan Kundera (a Czech), Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek (Austri-
an~), Arno Schrnidt (a German), Carlos Fuentes (a Mexican), Mario
Vargas Llosa (a Peruvian), Gabriel Garda Marquez (a Colombian),Julio
Cortazar (an Argentinian), Antonio Tabucchi (an Italian), Paul Auster
(an Arnerican), and Ant6nio Lobo Antunes (a Portuguese) testifies to
the continuing power of consecration enjoyed by the Paris authorities.
Kis, more conscious of the general mechanisms and more clear-sighted
perhaps with regard to the structural implications of world literary space
than earlier generations of writers recognized by Paris, asserted in 1982:
"For here in Paris, you see, at least for me, everything is literature. And
Paris, despite everything, still is and will always be the capital of litera~
ture."2 The evolution of world literary space since then lends support to
Kis's contention that Paris' function of discovery and consecration will
survive the de cline (real or imagined) of French letters. Certainly Paris
remains the capital of "deprived" as well as "marginal" literatures-writ-
ten by Catalans, Portuguese, Scandinavians,Japanese, and others-and it
may be expected to continue to give literary existence to writers from
countries that are the furthest removed from literary centers.
Cinema illustra tes the same mechanism and, particularly in the
French case, is a direct consequence of nationalliterary capital. Paris to-
day consecrates, supports, and in some cases finances filnlillakers frorn
India, Korea, Portugal, Mexico, Poland, Iran, Finland, Russia, Hong
Kong, and even the United States. But it is not the current prestige of
French films that accounts for this situation. Thanks to a volurne of cin-
r66 1 THE WORLO REPUBlIC OF LETTERS

ernatographic (and literary) capital that is universaily recognized, Paris
relnains not merely the capital of French cinema, but the capital of in-
dependent cinema the world over. One thinks of the international rep-
utations established there in recent de cades by Satyajit Ray, Manuel
de Oliveira, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Aki KaurisITlaki, Hou Hsiao-Hsien,
Woody Allen, and others.
Translation is therefore an essential rneasure of the scale and effective-
ness of consecration, for it is terms of the number of candidates for legit-
imacy and of the actual extent of autonornous consecration (via transla-
tion, commentary, critical notice, prizes) that the properly literary credit
of a capital is reckoned. A recent study of European trends shows that
Great Britain, which exports much of its literary production to other
countries in Europe, is also the least open to foreign works originating
outside its linguistic area: the share of translations into English as a frac-
tion of total British literary production for the year 1990 was only 3.3
percent. To be sure, the existence of a very large American market-
which ailows British authors to acquire an international audience with-
out changing language-is responsible in large part for this situation.
The authors of this study nonetheless insist upon the virtual "autarky of
the Anglo~Saxon markets," and indeed the evidence suggests that Brit-
ish resistance to foreign works of literature is far greater today than it
was in the 1950S and 196os. 3
German writing in recent years has suffered from almost systematic
neglect in Great Britain. 4 For ITlany readers the very adjective "Ger-
rnan" is associated with heaviness and an absence ofhuITlOr and style, by
contrast with the reputedly easy and popular manner of the English tra-
dition. The great works by German writers published in the 19 50S that
have since become classics-Thornas Mann, Rilke, Kafka, and Brecht-
retain a certain distant authority, as do those by Boil, Grass, Uwe John-
son, Peter Weiss, and other members of the Gruppe 47. But the scholars,
poets, translators, and cri tics who served after the war as indispensable
links to Gennan culture, many of them Jewish immigrants to Great
Britain, have now died off, and the image of German literature remains
the one they left behind. England today is almost fort y years behind the
tiITleS, notwithstanding its farniliarity with the work of Gert Hofmann
(whose son, Michael Hofinann, a poet and translator of German work
into English, lives in London), the Austrians Peter Handke and ThoITlaS
Bernhard, and Christa Wolf, an East German writer who has become
From Internatiol1alism to Globalization 1 167

weIl known in ferninist circles in the United States as weIl. One transla-
tor recently rernarked that even a rnonumental work by one of the rrlOst
important Gerrnan authors of his generation, Uwe Johnson's four-vol-
ume Jahrestage (Anniversaries, 1970-1983), "went practically unnoticed
on its appearance in England a few years ago."5
By contrast, Spain, Italy, Portugal, the Low Countries, Denrrlark, and
Sweden import a great nlany books: translations into the languages of
these countries represent nl0re than a quarter of total literary produc-
tion, considerably higher than the European average of 15 percent.
Translations account for 33 percent of published works in Portugal, ris-
ing to 60 percent in Sweden-an exceptionally high figure attributable
in part to the weak volurrle oflocal production, but also to the fact that
Sweden is the home of the coveted Nobel Prize, which has rnade it a
crossroads for world literature seeking to rnake itself known to the
Swedish AcaderrlY. This n1assive inflow of translated works, unbalanced
by _a correspondingly high share of hornegrown exports (the most
sought-after and translated literatures in Europe relnain English and
French), sets these countries apart frorrl their European neighbors. 6 In
France and Gennany, foreign works in translation account for between
14 and 18 percent of overall publishing activity---':a significant figure
that, in combination with a high level of exports, constitutes an irnpor-
tant measure of literary power.
The sarne analysis applies to the United States, where the cornmitlnent
of corrnnercial publishers to translation continues steadily to decline. It
is for this reason that New York and London cannot be said to have re-
placed Paris in the structure ofliterary power: one can only note that, as
a result of the generalization of the Anglo-Arnerican Inodel and the
growing influence of financial considerations, these two capitals tend to
acquire rrlOre and more power in the literary world. But one must not
oversÎlnplify the situation by applying a political analysis that opposes
Paris to New York and London, or France to the United States. The
fiction component ofliterary production in America, as in France, is di-
vided between two distinct poles. The first consists of novels that belong
to what Pierre Bourdieu calls the "subfield of restricted production,"
which is to say autonornous, avant-garde works that exist on the fringes
of mainstream publishing.7 In France, by contrast, such novels enjoy a
large measure of editorial and critical attention. The great French améri-

caniste tradition led by Larbaud, Coindreau, and Sartre, who played a key
role in the consecration of Faulkner and Dos Passos and the publication
of Nabokov's LoUta, is carried on today thanks to the efforts of leading
critics, translators, historians, and series editors such as Maurice Nadeau,
Marc Chenetier, Denis Roche, Pierre·-Yves Pétillon, and Bernard
Hoepffer. Their many critical anthologies, prefaces, and translations have
rnade them the privileged interlocutors of the most auto no mous Amer-
ican authors, including John Hawkes, Philip Roth, John Edgar Wide-
rnan, Don DeLillo, Robert Coover, William H. Gass, Paul Auster, Cole-
rnan Dowell, and William Gaddis.
The second pole consists of commercial literary production, associ-
ated by definition with the least auto no mous sectors of publishing,
which today exercises all the more attraction as it manages to imita te the
achievements of a certain narrative modernity. American (or American-
ized) large-scale literary production, having effortlessly succeeded in
rnaking articles of domestic consumption pass for "international" litera-
ture, poses a grave threat to the independence of the world ofletters as a
whole.What is being played out today in every part of world literary
space is not a rivalry between France and the United States or Great
Britain but rather a struggle between the commercial pole, which in
each country seeks to irnpose itself as a new source ofliterary legitimacy
through the diffusion of writing that mimics the style of the modern
novel, and the autonomous pole, which finds itself un der siege not only
in the United States and France but throughout Europe, owing to the
power of international publishing giants. The American avant-garde is
no less threatened today th an the European avant-garde.
The present-day structure of world literary space is therefore con-
siderably more complex than the one 1 have already described with re-
gard to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Zones of depend-
ency can no longer be identified solely with literarily deprived national
spaces. They can also now be observed in the oldest national fields,
where the appearance and consolidation of an increasingly powerful
cornrnercial pole has profoundly altered publishing strategies, affecting
not only patterns of distribution but also the selection of books and
even their content.
Now, it may be argued that the commercial pole in each country is
simply a transfonnation of the national pole or lTlerely one of its avatars.
The national bestseller, by virtue of its traditional form and themes
From Internationalism to Globalization 1 169

(drawn from the nation's history), conforms to the expectations and re-
quirements of commercial success. As Larbaud observed, national writ-
ers are distinguished not only by the robust sales that their works enjoy
in their own country but also by the fact that they are unknown to read-
ers in other countries. 8 The national novelist is one who produces for
the literary market of his own country, respecting its commercial cus-
toms. In the case of the United States, this rnarket has now COlne to
aSSUlTle global proportions, giving rise to a new breed of novel whose
international success is the combined result of the triulTlph of the corn-
mercial model in the publishing industry and of the universal adoption
of popular AlTlerican tas tes in fiction. Arnerica 's econolTuc dorrlinance,
notably in the fields of cinelTla and literature, has created a global market
for its popular national novels (of which Cane with the Wind is perhaps
the classic exarnple) on the basis of worldwide farrliliarity with Holly-
wood culture.
Everywhere today publishing is being transformed: not only is there a
gro~ing tendency toward concentration that works to standardize pro-
duction and to deprive innovative SlTlaller houses of their traditional
oudets; nl0re important still, the absorption of publishing by cornmuni-
cations conglolTlerates has changed the rules of the game. Describing
the shifting landscape in the United States, the noted independent pub-
lisher André Schiffrin points to rnergers arnong rnass-lTledia cOlnpanies
and to the spectacular increases in profits associated with the growth of
corporate concentration. 9 Whereas since the 1920S the average profit of
publishing houses (in Europe as weil as America) has been around 4 per-
cent,10 Schiffrin notes that in recent years, in Great Britain and the
United States, "the new owners insist that the level of profit for their
book publishing divisions be comparable to the level they require of
their other subsidiaries-newspapers, cable television, and film. The ob-
jective has therefore been set between 12 percent and 15 percent. This is
why there has been a radical change in the nature of the books responsi-
ble for achieving short-term profitability objectives."ll
In Europe, even if the situation has not yet changed so drarnatically,
the importation of the American econOlTUC nl0del has Ineant that pub-
lishers are increasingly concerned with profitability in the near term.
Accelerated inventory turnover and constant addition to the nurnber
of tides have displaced long-term investrnent arnong the priorities of
the great publishing houses. 12 Publishers now find it necessary to pub-

lish more titles in smaIler print runs that are sold in stores for a shorter
tirne and at incrementaIly higher prices-changes brought about in the
United States through a threefold process of consolidation merging
publishing houses, distribution channels, and retail outlets that has led in
turn to greater participation by technical and marketing staff in editorial
decisions. In short, the dissociation of inteIlectual purpose and editorial
policy has provoked a profound crisis in the publishing industry.13
The new organization of production and distribution, together with
the emphasis at alllevels upon irnmediate profitability, favors the trans-
national circulation of books conceived for the mass nurket. BestseIlers,
of course, have always sold across borders. What is new today is the rnan-
ufacture and promotion of a certain type of novel aimed at an interna-
tional rnarket. Under the label "world fiction," products based on tested
aesthetic forrnulas and designed to appeal to the widest possible reader-
ship-novels of acadernic life by internationaIly known authors such as
UlTlberto Eco and David Lodge, for example, as weil as neocolonial sa-
gas (such as Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy) that adopt ail the farniliar de-
vices of exoticism 14-are marketed alongside updated versions of rnyth-
ological fables and ancient classics that place a recycled "wisdom" and
rnorality within the reach of everyone and books that combine travel
writing with aspects of the adventure novel. These productions have
created a new composite measure of fictional modernity. Restored to
current taste are ail the techniques of the popuIar novel and the seriaI in-
vented in the nineteenth century: between the covers of a single volulTle
one can find a cloak-and-dagger drama, a detective novel, an adventure
story, a tale of econornic and political suspense, a travel narrative, a love
story, a mythological account, even a novel within the novel (the Iast a
pretext for false self-·referential erudition that makes the book its own
subject-an effect of the perceived necessity of irnitating "Borgesian"
modernity) .15 To some extent this trend is due to the changed role of
editors, whose traditional function of choosing arnong the manuscripts
that come to them has given way to a tendency to initiate and conceive
projects: a growing share of the books published today are commis-
sioned by the publisher. 16
Even the freest countries in world literary space are therefore subject to
the power of interIlatiQI1<1.tcommerce, which, in transforrning the con-
ditions of production, modifies the form of books themselves. The rise
From Internationalism to Globalization 1 171

of multinational conglomerates and the very broad diffusion of interna-
tionally popular novels that give the appearance of literariness have
called into question the very ide a of a literature independent of com-
rnercial forces. The "intellectual International" irnagined by Valery
Larbaud, who in the 1920S foresaw the advent of a srnaIl, cosmopolitan,
enlightened society that would silence national prejudices by recogniz-
ing and prornoting the free circulation of great works of avant-garde lit-
erature frorn aIl over the world, now stands in danger of being fatally
undermined by the imperatives of cornmercial expansion. A world liter-
ature does indeed exist today, new in its form and its effects, that circu-
lates easily and rapidly through virtually simultaneous translations and
whose extraordinary success is due to the fact that its denationalized
content can be absorbed without any risk of rnisunderstanding. But un-
der these circurnstances a genuine literary internationalisnl is no longer
possible, having been swept away by the tides of international business.

PART Il 1 Literary Revolts and Revolutions
1am an invisible man ... 1am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids-and 1
might even be said to possess a mind. 1am invisible, understand, simply because people re-
fuse to see me ... That invisibility to which 1refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of
the eyes of those with whom 1come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner
eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality.
-Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
6 1 The Small Literatures
A small nation's memory is not smaller than the memory of a large one and so can digest the
existing material more thoroughly. There are, to be sure, fewer experts in literary history em-
ployed, but literature is less a concern of literary history than of the people, and thus, if not
purely, it is at least reliably preserved. For the daim that the national consciousness of a
small people makes on the individual is su ch that everyone must always be prepared to know
that part of the literature which has come down to him, to support it, to defend it-to defend
it even if he does not know it and support it ... [Ail this] result[s] in the dissemination of lit··
erature within a country on the basis of political slogans.
-Franz Kafka, Diaries (25 December 1911)
LlTERARY 5PACE 15 not an irmnutable structure, fixed once and for all in its
hierarchies and power relations. But even if the une quaI distribution of
Iiterary resources assures that such forms of domination will endure, it is
also a source of incessant struggle, of challenges to authority and Iegiti-
macy, of rebellions, insubordination, and, uitimately, revolutions that al-
ter the balance of literary power and rearrange existing hierarchies. In
this sense, the only genuine history ofliterature is one that describes the
revolts, assaults upon authority, manifestos, inventions of new forms and
languages-all the subversions of the traditional order that, little by little,
work to create literature and the literary world.
Every literary space, including that of France, has been subject to
domination at one moment or another of its history. And the interna-
tionalliterary universe as a whole has taken shape through the attempts
rnade by figures on the periphery to gain entry to it. From the point of
view of the history and the genesis of worldwide space, then, literature is
a type of creation that is irreducibly singular and yet at the same tirne in-
herently collective, the work of all those who have created, reinvented,
or reappropriated the various means at their disposaI for changing the
order of the literary world and its existing power relations. Thus new
genres and forms have come into being, foreign works have been trans-
lated, and popular languages have acquired literary existence.
Ever since 1549, wh en The Dçfènse and Illustration cf- the French Lan-
guage first appeared, rnechanisms that paradoxically can only be de--
scribed as both historical and transhistorical have operated on the world
of letters. One observes consequences of dornination that are every-
where the sarne, that are exerted in every place and in every period in
identical fashion, and that furnish universal (or almost universal) insights
for understanding literary texts. By abstracting from the secondary his-
torical features of a given case, this rnodel rnakes it possible to associ-
ate~and so to understand-~quite different literary phenornena that are
separated frorn one another in both time and space. The consequences
of occupying a dominated and peripheral position are so powerful that it
becomes possible to bring together writers who appear to have nothing
in common.Whether they are separated frorn each other in time, as in
the case of Franz Kafka and Kateb Yacine, or of C. F. Ramuz and writers
in the French West Indies today; whether they use different languages,
as in the case of G. B. Shaw and Henri Michaux or of Henrik Ibsen
and James Joyce; whether they are former colonials or simply provin-
cials, founders of literary movements or simply renovators of traditional
forms, internal exiles within their own country, such as Juan Benet,
or érnigrés, such as Joyce and Danilo Kis-they all find themselves
faced with the same alternatives and, curiously, discover the same ways
out from the same dilelunus. In sonle cases they manage actually to
bring about revolutions, to pass through the mirror and achieve recogni-
tion by changing the rules of the game in the centers of the literary
world.
The sense of revelation is never greater than when one groups to-
gether and compares writers who, though they are separated by linguis-
tic and cultural traditions and appear to be opposed to one another in
every respect, neverthe1ess have in comrrlOn everything that a shared
structural re1ationship to a centralliterary power irrlplies. This is the case,

for example, with Ramuz and another Swiss author, Robert Walser.
Born the sarne year, 1878, the one at Lausanne, the other at Biel, their
careers foilowed similar paths that decisively affected the nature of their
writing: the early atternpts to establish thenlselves in their respective lit-
erary capitals-Ramuz settled in Paris, where for rnore than twelve
years he tried to achieve a reputation, while Walser began first in Mu-
nich, later moving to Berlin-which culrninated in failure and the
forced return to their native land; their subsequent clairns on behalf of a
rnodest, distinctly Swiss literature; and so on. The irnbalance in the liter-
ary resources of the regions from which they came explains the differ-
ences in the formaI choices made by the two writers, who stood in the
same relationship of fascination and rupture with their respective tradi-
tions: whereas Ramuz's approach to the rural novel was conditioned by
the relative absence ofliterary models in the Vaud, Walser, who as a Ger-
man Swiss writer was able to rely upon an older literary tradition,
adopted more sophisticated fonns.
In order simply to achieve literary existence, to struggle against the in-

visibility that threatens them from the very beginning of their careers,
writers have to create the conditions under which they can be seen. The
creative liberty of writers from peripheral countries is not given to thern
straight away: they earn it as the result of struggles whose reality is de-
nied in the nanle ofliterary universality and the equality of ail writers as
creative artists, by inventing cornplex strategies that profoundly alter the
universe of literary possibilities. The solutions that little by little are ar-
rived at-rescued, as it were, from the structural inertia of the literary
world-are the product of compromise; and the methods that they de-
vise for escaping literary destitution beconle increasingly subtle, on the
levels both of style and ofliterary politics.
By taking into account the variety of solutions for overcOlmng liter-
ary dependence, and thereby giving rneaning and justification to the
works and aesthetic preferences of writers frorn the literarily least en-
dowed countries, one can construct a "generative" rnodel capable of re-
producing the infinite series of such solutions on the basis of a linlited
number of literary, stylistic, and essentiaily political possibilities. In this
way it becornes possible to uncover unsuspected links between writers
whose affinity is suggested by neither stylistic analysis nor national liter-
ary histories, and so to assernble literary "families"-sets of cases that,
The Small Literatures 1 177

however distant frorn each other they rnay be in time and space, display a
kind of farnily resemblance. Ordinarily, writers are classified by nation,
genre, epoch, language, literary movement, and so on; or one chooses
not to classify them at ail, preferring to celebrate the "nliracle" of abso-
lute singularity rather than to attempt a genuinely comparative literary
history. In the best case, as with contemporary British cri tics who op-
pose V. S. Naipaul to Salman Rushdie, setting Naipaul's deterrnination
to assirnilate the values of a literary center against Rushdie's stance of
open resistance to literary neoimperialism, certain extrerne positions can
be identified. The consideration of literary works on an international
scale leads to the discovery of further principles of contiguity or differ-
entiation that make it possible to associate works that are not usuaily
thought of as being related and sometirnes to separate ones that are cus-
tomarily grouped together, thus bringing out neglected properties.
A literary model of this sort plainly consists of a series of theoretical
propositions that the infinite diversity of reality can serve only to nu-
ance, correct, and refine. It is not necessary to pretend that the model
exhausts or predicts ail aesthetic possibilities: the point is sirnply to show
that literary dependence favors the creation of a range of solutions that
writers from dorninated countries have both to reinvent and to defend
in order to create modernity, which is to say to change the structure of
the world ofletters through revolution.
But the behavior of these authors cannot be accounted for without
acknowledging at once that none of them acts or works in accordance
with consciously and rationally elaborated strategies-even if they are, as
1 have said, the most perspicacious figures in the literary world. The
"choice" of working for the development of a nationalliterature, or of
writing in a great literary language, is never a free and deliberate deci-
sion. The "laws" of nationalloyalty (or attachment) are so weil internal-
ized that they are seldom experienced as constraints; to the contrary,
they constitute a Inajor part ofliterary self-definition. What needs to be
described, then, is a general structure whose effects are felt by writers on
the periphery without their always knowing it, and which goes utterly
unnoticed by writers in the centers, whose universalized position pre-
vents thern from seeing it.
This model also makes it possible to reconstruct the chronology of
the formation of each literary space. Allowance being rnade for certain
rninor variations and differences associated with a particular political

history, linguistic situation, or literary heritage, the main initial stages of
literary formation are, as we shall see, essentially the SaITie for allliterary
spaces that have belatedly COITie into being as the result of assertions of
national identity. An almost universal and transhistorical order of devel-
oprnent-again, allowance being made for sorne ITieaSUre of historical
and linguistic variation-governs what is normally experienced, ana-
lyzed, and reported by historians of literature as an inalienable histori-
cal and national peculiarity. Over the four centuries during which the
world literary field has been formed and unified, the struggles and strat-
egies of writers seeking to create and marshal their own literary re-
sources have exhibited m.ore or less the same logic. Even if deavages-
and therefore conflict between cultural centers and their hinterlands-
have assurned new forms since the beginning of the nineteenth century,
and despite the extreITie diversity of literary and geopolitical circum-
stances, aesthetic debates, and political rivalries, the demands for literary
freedom and the revolts to which they have given rise can be described
in virtually transhistorical fashion, beginning with French literature
during the second half of the sixteenth century.
Two great families of strategies supply the foundation for all struggles
within nationalliterary spaces. On the one hand there is assimilation, or
integration within a dorninant literary space through a dilution or eras-
ing of original differences; on the other, differentiation, which is to say the
assertion of difference, typically on the basis of a daim to national iden-
tity. These two main sorts of solution, dear-cut at the mOITient a move-
ment aimed at achieving national independence appears, have long been
described by "indigenous" writers, who, more than anyone else, are fa-
miliar with the dilemnla facing them. Thus André de Ridder, in a book
on contemporary Flernish literature published in 1923, wrote:
Imagine the fate of a few true intellectuals lost on a similarly small is-
land [Flanders], separated from the rest of the world, having for spiri-
tual nourishment only the traditional literature, music, and art of a
small homeland. Between the peril of absorption by a powerful cul-
ture, endowed with a universal power of expansion-which for us is
the Latin culture on our southern borders, and the German culture to
the east of us-and the peril of isolation in a petty-minded and steril-
izing self-importance, tossed from one rock to the other, our pilots
have managed to steer their boat. 1

The West Indian poet Édouard Glissant has fonnulated this alternative
in rather sirnilar terrns, adding to it the problern of language: "'Live in
seclusion or open up to the other': this was supposedly the only alterna-
tive for any population dernanding the right to speak its own language
... Nations could have only one linguistic or cultural future-either this
seclusion within a restrictive particularity or, conversely, dilution within
a generalizing universal."2 Glissant's analysis is confirrned by Octavio
Paz, who in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech described the great
founding tension of American literatures: "The first [of these literatures]
to appear was that of the English-speaking part, and then . . . that of
Latin Anlerica in its two great branches, Spanish America and Brazil. Al-
though they are very different, these three literatures have one common
feature: the conflict, which is rnore ideological than literary, between
cosmopolitan and nativist tendencies, between Europeanism and Arner-
icanism."3
One of the peculiarities of the relationship that deprived writers
maintain with the literary world has therefore to do with the terrible
and inescapable dilemma they have to confront and then resolve in their
various ways, regardless of differences of political, national, literary, or
linguistic history. Faced with an antinomy that is unique to their situa-
tion (and that appears only to theln), they have to make an unavoidably
painful choice: either to affirm their difference and so condemn them-
selves to the difficult and uncertain fate of national writers (whether
their appeal is regional, popular, or other) writing in "small" literary lan-
guages that are hardly, or not at ail, recognized in the international liter-
ary world; or to betray their heritage and, denying their difference, as-
similate the values of one of the great literary centers. Thus Édouard
Glissant evokes the "sufferings of expression" that are peculiar to domi-
nated countries-so much so that other countries are uncomprehend-
ing, because unaware of them: "To our astonishrnent we also discover
people cornfortably established within the placid body of their language,
who cannot even comprehend that somewhere someone might experi-
ence an agony oflanguage and who will tell you flat out, as they have in
the United States, 'That is not a problem."'4
More th an a half-century earlier, Charles Ferdinand Ramuz's extraor-
dinary lucidity had enabled hirn to perceive and acknowledge a state of
affairs that ordinarily rerrlains inaccessible to consciousness. The situa-

tion in which he found hirnself deserves henceforth to be known as
RamUZ5 dilemma:
This is the dilemrna that l was faced with when l was twenty years
old, and that presents itself to all those who find themselves in the
same situation, whether they are many or few: outliers, those who are
born outside, beyond a frontier; those who, while linked to a culture
through language, are in a sense exiled from it through religion or po-
litical affiliation ... The problem presents itself sooner or later: one
has either to embark upon a career and first of ail yield to a set of rules
that are not orùy aesthetic or literary, but social and political as weil,
even worldly; or deliberately to break with them, not oTÙy by exp os-
ing, but also by exaggerating, one's own differences: even if it me ans
accepting [these rules] later on, if one can. 5
Later in this chapter (and in greater detail in Chapter 10) 1 shall ex-
amine the Irish Renaissance, which will serve as a sort of scale model or
paradigm for understanding almost all the problems faced by writers
from dominated literary worlds.
lITERARY DESTITUTION
The une quaI structure that characterizes the literary world opposes large
literary spaces to small ones and often places writers from small coun-
tries in situations that are both tragic and unbearable. It needs to be em-
phasized once rnore that the adjective "small" is used here in a specifie
sense to mean literarily deprived. Just as the Hungarian theorist Istvan
Bib6 (I9I1-I979) analyzed "the political poverty of the small nations of
Eastern Europe,"6 1 propose here to analyze literary poverty-but also
literary greatness, and the invention of literary freedom, in dorninated
spaces.
Though universalist literary belief agrees with Brancusi's dictmTI that
in art there are no foreigners, in reality national attachment is one of the
rnost burdensome constraints felt by writers; indeed, the more domi·-
nated the country, the rnore constraining it is. The Lithuanian author
Saulius Kondrotas (b. I953) described this phenomenon, which is inevi-
tably sensed even by nonnationalist artists, in the following terms: "1 do
not believe that one can escape one's origins. 1 am obviously not a pa-
triot; 1 do not care about the fate of the Lithuanians ... and yet 1 cannot

stand completely outside, 1 cannot escape the fact of being Lithuanian.
1 speak Lithuanian; 1 also believe that 1 think Lithuanian."7 Miroslav
Krleza (I 893- I 98 I), in the estirnation of Danilo Kis one of the greatest
Croat writers, who throughout his life and work sought to explore and
understand the paradoxes of "being Croat," likewise rnade a sort of phe-
nornenology of what is rightly called, through a curious oxymoron, na-
tional feeling. Nationality, in joining a singular and subjective concern
("feeling") with a collective sense ofbelonging ("national"), Krleza saw
as consisting of rnernories, of
a nostalgia born of pure subjectivity, the recollection of a youth that is

long past! Memories of military service, of flags, war, the sound of the
bugle, uniforms, the days of yesteryear, memories of carnival and of
bloody fighting, a whole theater of memory that seems much more
interesting than reality. N ationality consists in large measure of the
dreams of individuals who imagine a better life here below; for an in-
. tellectual, it is a childhood completely filled with books, poems, and
works of art, books read and paintings contemplated, wild imaginings,
conventional lies, prejudices, very often an incredibly acute percep-
tion of stupidity, and an unspeakable quantity ofblank pages! Nation-
ality, in bad, patriotic, sentimental, maudlin poetry, consists of women,
mothers, childhood, cows, pastures, prairies, a material condition into
which we are born, a miserable, backward patriarchal state in which il-
literacy is rnixed with lyrical moonlight ... Children learn from their
fathers what their fathers learned according to the law of tradition,
namely that their own nation is "great," that it is "glorious," or that it
is "unhappy and weighed down," imprisoned, duped, exploited, and
so on. 8
Only the ecumenicism that informs the universalist conception oflit-

erature prevents critics in the center from perceiving and understanding
the difficulties (in sorne cases the tragedies) of these writers, who are ex-
trernely clear about the fragile and marginal position they occupy, and
who suffer both from belonging to a literarily unrecognized nation and
from the fact that this very circumstance goes unrecognized. The notion
of sm aIl nations, Milan Kundera remarked, "is not quantitative; it de-
scribes a situation; a destiny: small nations do not have the cornfortable
sense ofbeing there always, past and future ... always faced with the ar-
rogant ignorance of the large nations, they see their existence perpetu-
ally threatened or called into question; for their very existence is a ques-

tion."9 Small nations, the writer and translator frorn the Serbo-Croat
Janine Matillon observes, "have sorrows that the great ones do not
even suspect."lO The smailness, poverty, backwardness, and remoteness of
these literary worlds render the writers who live in them invisible-im-
perceptible in the strict sense--to internationalliterary authorities. This
invisibility and remoteness appear clearly to those writers on the pe-
riphery who are "internationally recognized," and therefore able to
evaluate precisely the position of their hornelands in the tacit and irrlpla-
cable hierarchy of world literature. It is this very invisibility that forces
them to come to terms with the smallness of the lands where they were
born: "What then are we to do, the rest of us, who have neither action
nor expression?" moaned Ramuz on coming back to his native Vaud. 11
"Here we are a tiny country that needs to be enlarged, a rather fiat one
that needs to be deepened, a poor one that needs to be enriched. Poor in
legends, poor in history, poor in events, poor in occasions."12 Beckett's
later, more violent characterization of Ireland, in an early poem, as a
"haernorrhoidal isle"13 and, in one ofhis first prose works, as a "pestifer-
ous country"14 likewise summarizes the unhappiness he felt toward his
native land, which, though it infuriated him, he nonetheless identified
with.
Where the irreversible, in sorne sense ontological condition of be-
longing to a literarily disinherited country is bound up with tragedy, it
not only impresses its mark on the entire life of an author but also gives
his whole work its form. E. M. Cioran's writing, for example, his very
philosophical and intellectual purpose, can be understood only by con-
sidering his relationship to Romanian intellectual and literary space,
which he soon he came to see as a malign inevitability. Even toward the
end of his life he maintained that the "pride of a man born in a small
culture is forever wounded," although by then he had long been a fa-
mous writer, celebrated throughout the world. 15 His ambivalent feelings
toward his own small country (which is to say toward himself, insofar as
his own identity, as is often the case with intellectuals in smail countries,
was primarily national) led him at first to become a fascist and national-
ist intellectual. He joined the Iron Guard in the 1930S before finally
choosing exile and a "despairing contempt" for his people, having ab an-
doned ail belief in the "future" of Rornania ("With the peasants, one
enters history only through the 'smail door"').16 Evoking his fascist
youth in a recently published text written in 1949, Cioran recalled: "We,
The Small Literatures 1 18 3

the young of my country, were living on Insanity. This was our daily
bread. Located in a corner of Europe, scorned and neglected by the
world, we wanted to cali attention to ourselves . . .We wanted to rise
up to the surface of history: we revered scandaIs, the only rneans, we
thought, of avenging the obscurity of our condition, our sub-history,
our nonexistent past, and our hurrlÎliation in the present."17
In a way it was the curse of an obscure origin, the anger at having to
write in an alrnost untranslated language, the frustration ofbeing unable
to daim any grandiose national "destiny," the hunùliation of having to
subrrrit to the whims of ordinary people that led Cioran from active po-
litical involvernent to a haughty dis engagement. Schimbarea la jàta a
Romaniei (Changing the Face of Romania, I936), a fascist and anti-
serrritic work published on his return frorn Gerrnany in I936, can be
read as a frightening adrrrission of the historical disappointrnent ofbeing
Romanian, experienced as a kind of ontological inferiority: "1 dream,"
h~ wrote, "of a Romania that would have the destiny of France and the
population of China."18 Having tried unsuccessfuliy to work for "na-
tional salvation"-the pervasive theme of ali his early writings-Cioran
thus sought his own salvation in Paris. So that his genealogy and his ca-
reer up until that point rrright be forgotten, he had not only to start over
again from zero (and thus relinquish the inteliectual capital he had accu-
mulated in Bucharest) but also to abandon his native language.
What may be experienced as a historical curse is sometirnes also ex-
pressed as a linguistic injustice. Max Daireaux, in his study of Latin
American literature in the early twentieth century, reports the comment
of the Guatemalan writer Enrique Garnez Carrillo (I873-I927), who,
having published more than twenty volumes of fiction and criticism and
several thousand columns of journalism, had achieved (in Daireaux's
words) "the maximum celebrity to which a South American author can
aspire." "For a writer who is the least bit universai-rrrinded," Gamez
Carrillo rernarked, "the Spanish language is a prison.We can pile up
volurnes, even find readers, it's exactly as though we had written noth-
ing: our voice doesn't carry beyond the bars of our cage! One can't even
say that the terrible wind of the pamapas carried it away, it's worse th an
that: it vanishes!"19 This remark makes it dear, incidentaliy, that the bal-
ance of power and inequality within the world of letters is continually
modified and transformed: if Latin Arnerica was an altogether marginal
and remote literary space in the I930S, lac king any international recog-

nition, thirty years later virtually the opposite was true, the continent
having in the meantirne bec orne one of the best recognized of the dorn-
inated spaces, better integrated th an most with the center. It is in this
sense that the fine phrase-disillusioned and realistic-of the Sornalian
novelist Nuruddin Farah, who described his own identity as a domi-
nated writer arnong dominated writers as consisting in a series of" con-
tradictory unsuitabilities," is to be understood: 20 not only are the irnpov-
erished-whether their poverty is literary, political, or linguistic"--never
suitable, which is to say they never conform, never find their place, are
never truly at ease in the literary world; more than this, their various
unsuitabilities are thernselves contradictory, forrning an inextricable web
of malediction, unhappiness, anger, and revoIt.
This effort to supply the means for understanding and interpreting
the special character of works from the periphery of the literary world
through a structural description of literary relations and imbalances of
power on a world scale will perhaps appear shocking to anyone who has
a blinkered view of creative freedom. But one really must try to see, as
against the widely shared illusion of a universal poetic inspiration that
indifferently grants its favor to all the world's artists, that constraints are
exerted unequaily upon writers; and that these constraints weigh ail the
rnore heavily on sorne writers rather th an others as their true nature is
obscured to satisfy the official definition of literature as indivisible, uni-
versaI, and free. To point out that dispossessed writers are subject to su ch
constraints is not a way of blacklisting or ostracizing them; to the con-
trary, it is a way of showing that their works are even more improbable
than others, that they manage almost rniraculously to emerge and to
make themselves recognized by subverting the literary laws laid down
by the centers, through the invention of novelliterary solutions.
Although national attachment must be regarded, especially in the case of

the small nations, as a sort of destiny, it is not always experienced nega-
tively-far from it. In the early stages of a country's history, and during
times of great political upheaval (marked, for example, by the corning to
power of dictatorial regirnes and the outbreak of war) , the nation is
claimed as the indispensable condition of political independence and lit-
erary freedom. But paradoxically it is the most international writers
who, while rejecting adherence to national belief, are the best at describ-
ing the literary manifestations of national feeling. Critically, and with a

certain vindictiveness, they express a complex truth to which they alone,
by virtue of their position both inside and outside national lit e rary space,
are capable ofbearing witness. The mixture of irony, hatred, cornpassion,
empathy, and reflectiveness that defines both their ambiguous relation-
ship to their country and their feIlow countrymen, on the one hand,
and, on the other, the rejection of ail national pity-a rejection whose
very violence is cornmensurate with the filtility of their revolt-per-
fectly captures the literary sensibility of national belief in smaIl coun-
tries. The inevitable perception of a cultural hierarchy in the world, and
the need to defend and illustrate the daims of sm ail countries, are signs
of the tragic impasse in which national writers find themselves caught
up as a result of this inexorable attachrnent to their nation. ThusWitold
Gornbrowicz denounced Polish inteIlectuals in exile who
purport to show once again (yes, again!) that we are equal to the
greatest world literatures, except that we are unknown and unappreci-
ated . . . For they, in elevating Mickiewicz, were denigrating them-
selves and with their praise of Chopin showed that they had not yet
sufficiently matured to appreciate him and that by basking in their
own culture, they were simply baring their primitiveness ... 1 felt like
saying to those gathered: " ... Chopin and Mickiewicz serve only to
emphasize your own narrow-mindedness, because, with the naiveté of
children, you prance out your polonaises under the noses of a bored
foreign audience just so you can strengthen the impaired sense of your
own worth ... You are the poor relations of the world, who try to im-
press themselves and others" . . . This is the source of the respect, the
eager humility exhibited toward phraseology, the admiration for Art,
the conventional and learned language, the lack of integrity and hon-
esty. Here they were reciting. The gathering was also marked by inhi-
bition, artificiality, and falseness, because Poland was taking part in the
meeting and a Pole does not know how to act toward Poland, it con-
fuses him and makes him mannered. Poland inhibits the Pole to such a
degree that nothing really "works" for him. Pol and forces him into a
cramped state-he wants to help it too much, he wants to elevate it
too much ... 1 thought that this auction with other nations for ge-
niuses and heroes, for merits and cultural achievement, was really quite
awkward from the point of view of propaganda tactics because with
our half-French Chopin and not quite native Copernicus, we cannot
compete with the ltalians, French, Germans, English, or Russians.
Therefore, it is exactly this approach that condemns us to inferiority.21

In the 1920S Miroslav Krleza ruade the sarrle observation, not orny in
the same terms but with the same tone of exasperated and desperate
irony of one who cannot help but be an example of what he condemns:
One of the typical weaknesses of petit-bourgeois Croat sentiment,

lulled by illusions, is that it resents its own national attachment as an
infected wound, that it bears a childish love for its debility, that it
adores overestimating itself in the domain of art, and more precisely in
that of poetry, a subject on which it nonetheless has no grounds for
congratulating itself ... Old-fashioned, backward, petit-bourgeois, the
allegedly aristocratie Croat sentiment suffers from a social inferiority
complex ... We descend the last steps of provincial backwardness, our
intelligence is a dog that wags its tail in front of strangers, with the
baseness of a slave, with the unconsciousness of a child, and we give
proof, in demeaning ourselves in this way, that we are exactly what we
deny being: the servile incarnation of nonvalue. 22
Beckett and Michaux: The Antinational Mood

Orny the weight of an indelible national origin, which writers who re-
ject their history and their originalliterary milieu yet fail to escape, can
explain the sirrlilarities between two youthful texts, one by Samuel
Beckett, the other by Henri Michaux. Each came from a dorninated
space and sought to make a name for himself in the literary capital ofhis
linguistic area-London for Beckett, Paris for Michaux; each sought to
give an account of the young nationalliterature of his country.
"Recent Irish Poetry" (1934), one of Beckett's first essays, published
shortly after his arrivaI in London in the Bookman) provides an extensive
overview of Irish poetry at the time. Signed with a pseudonym, it stated
the author's views on various aesthetic and ethical questions, notably his
refusaI to endorse the Celtic folklore movement, and unambiguously
designated his literary adversaries. He deliberately, and provocatively, re-
jected the whole national tradition ushered in by Yeats and carried on
by Catholic intellectuals, stilliargely dominant in the early 1930S. "Thus
conternporary Irish poets," he observed, "rnay be divided into antiquari-
ans and others, the former in the majority, the latter kindly noticed by
MrW B. Yeats as 'the fish that lie gasping on the shore."'23 The young
Beckett took airn, directly or indirectly, at Yeats himself, the greatest
Irish poet of the day, then seventy years old, winner of the Nobel Prize
Iuore than a decade earlier, a worldwide celebrity, everywhere honored

as the greatest living poet of the English language, national hero and
grand old man of internationalletters. Casting scorn on the obligatory
and repetitive mythic themes of Celtic folklore, Beckett's derision ex-
tended to the other members of the Irish pantheon as well: James
Stephens, Padraic Colurn, George Russell, Austin Clarke, F. R. Higgins.
In the Gaelicizing and nationalist atrnosphere of Dublin in the 1920S
and 1 93 os, Beckett's position arnounted to heresy.
Ten years earlier, addressing his "Lettre de Belgique" (l924) to Amer-
ican readers in the prestigious Transatlantic Revie~ Henri Michaux had
clairned exactly the same high ground. 24 He began by denouneing
the standard cliché of Belgian literature (borrowed, as Pierre Bourdieu
has shown, frorn a stereotypical irnage of Flemish painting),25 both as a
eornmonplace ("Foreigners usually imagine the Belgian at table, eating
and drinking. Painters reeognize hirn in Jordaens, writers in Camille
Lemonnier, tourists in the 'Manneken-Pis''')26 and as a national reality
("The work of the belly, glands, saliva, blood vessels, seems among [the
Belgians] to be sornething conscious, a eonscious pleasure. Translated
into literature, the joys of the flesh rnake up the bulk of their works.
One thinks of [Carnille Lemmonier, Georges Eekhoud, Eugène
Demolder]").27 Here one notes Michaux's impertinence in treating in a
few apparently ofihand lines some of the great figures of Belgian litera-
ture-though in fact, as we know frorn one of his few autobiographi-
cal writings, all the great writers associated with the review Jeune Bel-
gique (founded in l88l) were very important for him. 28 But ifhe granted
the existence of these established writers (including Énlile Verhaeren,
whom he briefly mentions later), he described contemporary literature
in his homeland as a sort of desert. He then went on to ridicule the Bel-
gian "charaeter" ("good-natured, simple, unpretentious"), which he ex-
plained by reference to a eurious sort of inferiority cornplex:
The Belgian is afraid of pretension, has a phobia about pretension, es-

peciaily the pre tension of written or spoken words. Whence his ac-
cent, that famous way of speaking French. The secret is just this: the
Belgian believes that words are pretentious. He chokes and smothers
them as much as he can, so that they will become inoffensive, good-
natured ... The rather general return to simplicity that has made itself
feIt in the arts therefore finds young men of letters here marvelously
weil prepared, and is already taking effect ... Poets in Belgium today 1
would readily call virtuosos of simplicity, and 1 would have to cite al-
most ail of them. 29

The work of these poets ("in general of a caliber strongly influenced
by France, and by J. Cocteau") was criticized for its "triteness, banality,
and a laxness of language."3o Michaux rnentioned sonle fifteen narnes,
among thern his own.
Here one thinks again of the young Beckett, who sent Sarnuel Put-
narn, an Arnerican who with Edward Titus edited the review This Quar-
ter and who had accepted four ofhis poerrlS for an anthology of new Eu-
ropean poetry,31 a biographical notice that he had composed hirnself:
"Samuel Beckett is the rnost interesting of the younger Irish writers. He
is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, and has lectured at the École
Normale Supérieure in Paris. He has a great knowledge of Romance
literature, is a friend of Rudmose-Brown and of Joyce, and has adapted
the Joyce rnethod to his poetry with original results. His impulse is lyric,
but has been deepened through this influence and the influence of
Proust and the historic method."32 Michaux's style of talking about him-
selfwas more sober: "Henry [sic] Michaux has sometirnes wrongly been
judged to be a poet ... Poetry, if such a thing exists, is the rninirnum that
rernains in any humanly true account. He is an essayist."33 Michaux
went on instead, in the "Lettre de Belgique," to defend Franz Hellens,
the novelist, poet, and critic who edited the review Le Disque Vert, in
which he published his first pieces.
ln their earliest writings, then, these two young poets adopted the
same general attitude of rejection toward their national literary space,
displayed a similar critical distance, a sünilar irony with regard to their
elders. Ali of this plainly suggests a comparison between their careers as
exiled poets, determined to break with the literary establishrnents of
their countries. But their evident disdain testified as much to an ineradi-
cable attachment to a national literary space as to a desire to distance
themselves fronl it: even the most international writers, at least in the
formative stages of their career, are tirst of ail defined, in spite of their
wishes to the contrary, by their native national and literary space.
POLITICAl DEPENDENCIES
Politicization in national or nationalist [onn-and therefore, in a sense,
nationalization-is one of the constitutive features of small literatures:
proof, as it were, of the necessary link between literature and nation at
the moment wh en a country takes its first steps toward revoIt and
dissirnilation. The Irish Literary Revival, for exarnple, took over in a
certain sense frorn the late nineteenth-century nationalist rnovernent in

politics. The fà11 and suicide in 189 l of Charles Stewart Parnell-the
"shrewd obstructionist" who had ernbodied immense political hopes
throughout Ireland 34-marked the failure of a certain forrn of politi-
cal action and indefinitely postponed a politically acceptable solution.
The literary renaissance that füllowed expressed the political dis en-
chantment of an entire generation of intellectuals. In a strongly politi-
cized country that had long been accustorrled to nationalist struggle, the
passage from political nationalism to cultural (and above allliterary) na-
tionalism arrlOunted to pursuing the same ends by different means; or
rather, the national and political question was precisely the issue that
would split the literary world, with the Anglo-Irish Protestants-more
culturally than politically rninded-Ied by Yeats on one side and, on
the other, the nlore politicized Catholic intellectuals who fought for
aesthetic (and political) realism and the rehabilitation of Gaelic. But
whether they sought to reject or to embrace it, the "connection with
politics" (to adopt Kafka's expression regarding small literatures) was
perrnanent in the case of Irish writers.
If for sorne years, then, literary activity took the place of political
cornbat, it also furnished political combatants with other weapons: the
insurgents of Easter 19 l 6 were fervent readers of Yeats, Synge, and
Douglas Hyde. Many of the leaders of this bloody and unsuccessful re-
volt, including Patrick Pearse and Thomas MacDonagh, were intellec-
tuaIs ("1 who knew," as George Russell recalled in 1934, "how deep
was Pearse's love for the Cuchulain whom O'Grady discovered or in-
vented") .35 The chronology of the rnovement itself is political, since the
uprising of Easter 1916 also marked a turning point in Irish drama and
poetry. Yeats withdrew afte rward , adopting a sort of aristocratic and
spiritualist distance. Turning against literary realism, directly assirrlilated
to poli tics, he sought autonorny in a nostalgic retirement.
The politicization of Irish literary space supplies the measure of its
dependence: as la te as 1930 it was still a very peripheral area, distant from
the great European literary centers and remaining largely under the his-
torical and political dorrlination of London. To a large degree the liter-
ary choices of writers in Dublin were deterrrlined by their relation to
the English authorities; even their aloofness, their refusaI to recognize
the aesthetic and critical standards of the British capital, is an indication
of the influence of its canons in Irish literary life. The description of this
space therefore cannot be lirrlited (as it typically is by critics who con-

fuse national boundaries and the borders of literary space) to literary
events in Dublin.
Within deprived spaces, writers are condemned, in effect, to develop a

national and popular theme: they n1ust defend and iIlustrate national his-
tory and controversies, if only by criticizing thern. Because they are for
the most part concerned to defend a certain idea of their country, they
are engaged in elaborating a national literature. The irnportance of the
national and popular theme in a nation's literary production is surely the
best measure of the degree of political dependence of a literary space.
The central question, then, around which the Inajority of literary de-
bates are organized in emerging literary spaces (to differing degrees de-
pending on the date of their political independence and the scale of
their literary resources) involves the nation, the language, and the peo-
ple-which is to say the language of the people and the linguistic, liter-
ary, and historical definition of the nation. In politicaIly annexed or
dominated regions, literature is a weapon of combat and national resis-
tance. "When Korea lost its sovereignty as a result of its annexation by
]apan [in I9IO]," one critic has remarked, "the formidable task of assur-
ing the return of this sovereignty feIl to literature alone. In a sense, this
mission was its point of departure."36 Entrusted with responsibility for
creating a national language and so laying the foundation for a unique
and inalienable national culture, writers place their writing in the ser-
vice of the nation and the people. Literature thus becOlnes national or
popular, or both, devoted to promoting the nation as an ide a and help-
ing it, once the idea has become a reality, to join the ranks of aIl those
nations that enjoy literary existence and recognition. Thus a pantheon
cornes to be established, a history, a line of prestigious ancestors and
founders. "A slnaIl nation," Milan Kundera has observed, "resembles a
big farnily and likes to describe itself that way ... Thus in the big family
that is a sn1aIl country, the artist is bound in rnultiple ways, by rnultiple
cords.When Nietzsche noisily savaged the German character, when
Stendhal announced that he preferred Italy to his horneland, no German
or Frenchman took offense; if a Greek or a Czech dared to say the same
thing, his family would curse him as a detestable traitor."37
The link with national struggle therefore produces a dependence
upon the new national public, and so an almost total absence of au ton-
orny. In Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century, this depen-

dence was the source of the various "scandaIs" that punctuated the life
of the Abbey Theatre, which, as one of the only national institutions of
occupied Ireland, was used as a meeting place by nationalist militants.
Anything that threatened to challenge the mythology of national hero-
isrn and the accepted narrative of the nation's founding was irnrnediately
rejected by a furious public, denying writers the least measure of creative
independence. The violence that attended the prerniere ofSynge's Play-
boy of the Western World in 1907 is proof of this alrnost total absence of
autononlY, this fundamental dependence with regard to public opinion
and the nationalist cause. Two decades later, when O'Casey's The Shadow
cif' the Gunman was being performed, a note was inserted in the program
warning spectators: "Any gunshots heard during the perforrnance are
part of the script. Mernbers of the audience rnust at aIl times rernain
seated."38 It needs to be kept in mind that when the play was produced
in April 1923, the civil war was not yet over. The realistic quality of the
perforrnance was in any case directly and immediately related to the po-
litical situation and not to any specifie dramatic technique, the events
depicted on stage having taken place scarcely three years earlier. Jarnes
Joyce, who clairned a position of autonomy with regard to popular
norms by challenging the obviousness of the "national duty" of national
writers, deplored precisely this subrnission of creative artists to the tastes
of the public in "The Day of the Rabblement," his violent attack on the
Irish Literary Theatre:
N ow, your popular devil is more dangerons than your vulgar devil ...
the Irish Literary Theatre must now be considered the property of the
rabblement of the most belated race in Europe . , . the rabblement,
pla cid and intensely moral, is enthroned in boxes and galleries anlid a
hum of approval ... If an artist courts the favor of the multitude he
cannot escape the contagion of its fetichism and deliberate self-deception,
and ifhe joins in a popular movement he does so at his own risk. 39
Unlike what was happening in the old declining countries of Europe,

which saw the rebirth of regressive and nostalgie nationalisms, the new
nationalisms were for the rnost part politically subversive to the extent
that they grew up in opposition to a foreign imperialism. Just as nation-
alisms, whether political or cultural, are not equivalent to one another
in either form or content, and differ according to their historical extent,
so writers who clainl a national role in the newest spaces-as Synge,

O'Casey, and Douglas Hyde did in Ireland at the beginning of the twen-
tieth century-for this reason occupy a complex position, neither aca-
dernic nor conservative, that obliges thern to resort to apparently hetero-
norrlOUS means to achieve their independence. For aIl those who are
deprived of a literary heritage, of an established tradition, who are dis-
possessed with respect to language, culture, and popular traditions, there
is no alternative but to take up political arms in order to gain literary au-
thority-on pain of being crushed and absorbed into another literary
tradition. In this struggle, the principal weapons are the people and the
language (supposed or proclaimed) of the people.
The political stakes change on1y when the literary field asserts its
independence vis-à-vis national and political imperatives; when anti-
national (or anational) writers appear-such as Joyce, and then Beckett,
in Ireland-and, by reversing the polarity of the space, as it were, rele-
gate national writers to political dependence, aesthetic backwardness,
and acadernicisnl.
In reality, from the middle of the twentieth century onward, writers
from the most deprived spaces have had to achieve two forms of indepen-
dence simultaneously: political independence, in order to give existence to
the nation as a state and share in its recognition on the international
level; and a properly literary independence, by establishing a language
that is both national and popular and th en contributing, through their
work, to the literary enrichnlent of their country. The desire of writers
frorn the youngest spaces to free themselves from internationalliterary
domination therefore leads them to subordinate their literary practices
to political interests to sorne extent, so that the quest for literary auton-
orny in these countries proceeds initially through the achievement of
political independence, which is to say by rneans ofliterary practices that
are closely linked to the national question. It is on1y when a minimum
of political resources has been accumulated, and a minimum of political
independence attained, that the struggle for a specifically literary auton-
orny can be carried on.
In oIder spaces it may also happen that the process of achieving au-
tonorrly is abruptly interrupted for one reason or another, with the re-
sult that intellectuais are forced to resort to the sarne strategies as their
counterparts in emerging nations. The coming to power of military dic-·
tatorships in Spain and Portugal, for example, and the establishment of
Con1munist regirrles in newly formed countries in central and eastern
The Small Literatures 1 I93

Europe produced the sarne phenornenon ofliterary nationalization and
intense politicization, thus marginalizing writers. Under the long dicta-
torships of Franco and Salazar, the Spanish and Portuguese spaces saw
themselves subjugated and absorbed by the political sector, through the
regulation of the content and fonn ofliterary works. Despite an ancient
literary history in these countries, and therefore a certain degree of au-
tonomy, the freedonl of literary rnaneuver becarne directly dependent
on the will of the government. Writers were now subjected to censor-
ship and turned into instrurnents of official policy; every rnanifesta-
tion of aesthetic (and political) independence was repressed, and the his-
torical separation of national and literary authorities suspended. Under
such circumstances, writers-no less than opponents of the regirne-are
obliged to conform to a narrowly political and national definition of
cultural identity. Deprived of their independence, they find thernselves
fàced with a choice familiar to authors in ernerging worlds ofletters: ei-
ther to produce a politicalliterature in the service of national interests or
to go into exile.
What happened in France between 1940 and 1944 rnust be under-
stood in the same terms.With the German occupation, French literary
space suddenly lost its autonomy. The imposition of censorship, together
with political and military repression, caused the totality of issues and
positions to be redefined over the course of a few rnonths. As in the
most deprived emerging spaces, the preoccupation with national con-
cenIS in France-which had long been subordinate to an autonornous
conception of literary practices--once again assumed the highest im-
portance, forcing intellectuals to reconsider their comnlÎtrnents;40 and,
in a repetition of the experience of young literatures, the batde to regain
literary autonomy took the fonn of a struggle for the political indepen-
dence of the nation. A striking reversaI of positions ensued, with the
consequence (as Gisèle Sapiro has shown) that those French writers
who before the war were the most independent-which is to say the
most fonnalist, the least political-becarne after l 939 the rnost national,
joining the Resistance and fighting to defend the nation against the
Gennan occupier and the Nazi order. 41 They ternporarily abandoned
the privileges of formalisrn in order to fight politically for the autonorny
of the literary field. Conversely, those writers who before the war were
the rnost national, the least autonOITlOUS, chose collaboration with the
foreign occupier.
194 1 THE WORl.D REPUBLIC OF lETTERS

Apart from extraordinary political situations of this sort, one must be
careful not to confuse national writers from smallliterary nations with
national (or nationalist) writers in the most endowed spaces. The pro-
nounced academic tendencies that are perpetuated in the oldest literary
countries, in France and Great Britain, for example, are proof that au-
tonOlny rernains very relative even in these supposedly independent
worlds, and that the national pole rernains powerful. These writers con-
tinue to ignore the existence of a literary present from which they are
excluded, and which they oppose, sonletimes violently.Using the in-
struments of the past, they produce national texts. There is today an "In-
ternational" of academics (and academicians) who continue to profess
nostalgia for outmoded literary practices in the name of a lost literary
grandeur: at once centrally situated and imrnobile, they are ignorant of
current innovations and inventions in literature; and as members ofliter-
ary juries and presidents of national writers' associations, they manufac-
ture and help reproduce (notably through national prizes such as the
Prix Goncourt in France) conventional criteria that are out of date in
relation to the latest standards of modernity. In short, they consecrate
works that conform to their aesthetic categories. In older literary coun-
tries, the nationalist intellectual is, by definition, an academic in stylistic
terms, since he knows nothing other than his national tradition.
The national conformism and conservatisrn peculiar to French, Eng-
lish, and Spanish academics have nothing in comrnon with the political
and literary struggle of the Québécois and Catalans, for exarnple, for na-
tional independence. Writers in these societies, no matter what place
they occupy in literary space, even the most cosmopolitan and subver-
sive among them, remain to sorne extent attached to a requirement of
nationalloyalty or, at least, continue to conceive of their work in terms
of domestic political debates. Called upon to devote themselves primar-
ily to the building of the symbolic nation, writers, grarnmarians, lin-
guists, and intel1ectuals are in the front line, fighting to provide the new
idea with a justification (in Ramuz's phrase).42
In worlds in which political and literary poles are still indistinct, writ-
ers are thus commonly made to act as spokesrnen, in the strict sense of
the term, of the people. "1 think that it is time," the Kenyan writer ]arnes
Ngugi (who later changed his name to Ngugi wa Thiong'o) asserted in
the I960s, "that the African writers also started to talk in the terms of
these workers and peasants."43 In Nigeria, Chinua Achebe (b. I930) de-
fended a "political literature" and the necessity of devoting oneself to

"applied art" in order to avoid what he called the irnpasses of "pure
art."44 This inseparably political and aesthetic position illurninates his
view, repeatedly reaffirmed, of the role reserved for the writer in young
nations. Achebe's two famous articles from the mid-I96os, "The Novel-
ist as Teacher" and "The Role of a Writer in a New Nation"-rnuch
discussed and approved by African intellectuals-clearly laid out his
conception of the writer as pedagogue and nation-builder: "The writer
cannot expect to be excused from the task of re-education and regener-
ation that rnust be done. In fact he should marchright in front. For he is
after all ... the sensitive point of his community."45 In choosing to be a
literary pioneer, the writer unavoidably places himself in the service
of national enlightenment. Thus, like Standish O'Grady and Douglas
Hyde, historians of the Irish nation and literature in the late nineteenth
century, Chinua Achebe was to become the bard and repository of Ni-
gerian national history. In a series offour novels published between I958
and I966, he set himself the task of retracing the history of Nigeria from
the -beginnings of colonization until independence. The first novel of
the cycle, Things Fall Apart (I958), a rare Mrican bestseller (selling more
than two million copies), described the encounter between the inhabit-
ants of an Ibo village and the first rnissionaries to visit it. Standing ex-
actly between the two parties, it managed simultaneously to present and
explain their antagonistic points of view, seeking in this way to make
sense of African reality and civilization in English. At once a realist, di-
dactic, denl0nstrative, and national novel, its dual ambition was to pro-
vide Nigeria with a national history and to teach this history to the
people.
In the absence of autonomy, the function of the historian-the per-
son who knows and transmits historical truth, whose narrative estab-
lishes a national cultural patrimony for the first time-and the function
of the poet are merged. The novelistic form furnishes the initial basis,
then, for both a historical account of the nation and a national epic.
Kafk.a had already emphasized this point in connection with the new
Czechoslovakia, arguing that the work of the national historian is essen-
tial to the constitution of a fund ofliterature as well. 46
NATIONAL AESTHETICS
Joyce observed that the national and nationalist writer had difficulty es-
caping the "deliberate self-deception"-another name for realisrn-that

he ascribed to the people. And still today, in fact, one observes a genuine
hegemony of realism in aIl its forrrls and denorrunations-neonaturalist,
picturesque, proletarian, socialist, and so on-in the most impoverished
(which is to say the rnost politicized) literary spaces. The graduaI emer-
gence of a dorrunant, indeed, virtually unchallenged literary aesthetic
has occurred at the crossroads of two revolutions, the one literary and
the other political. Because neorealisrn in its national and popular ver-
sions excludes any fonn of literary autonomy and makes literary pro-
duction a function of politics, it is not surprising to find that, despite
certain variations, the same realist (or "illusionist") assumption is com-
rnon to ernerging literary spaces and to those that are subject to strong
political censorship.
Additional evidence of the essential heteronomy of literary realism is
that it is also found in those literary or paraliterary productions that are
rnost constrained by the cornmercial irrlperatives of national, and es-
pecially international, publishing-thus signaling the triumph of what
Roland Barthes called the "appearance of reality" and Michael Riffa-
terre the "mythology of reality."47 Naturalism is the only literary tech-
nique that gives the illusion of a coincidence between narrative and re-
ality. The belief produced by this illusion allows it to be used in turn
either as an instrument of political power or as a critical tool: conceived
as the ultimate point of coincidence between fiction and reality, realism,
rnore than any other doctrine, lends itself to political interests and pur-
poses. The "proletarian novel" advocated by the Soviets was perhaps
its most complete incarnation. 48 More generally, the conjunction of
neorealist aesthetics and the use of a national ("popular," "workers' ,"
or "peasant") language represents the preerrlÎnent form of the literary
heteronomy experienced by writers in literary spaces under political
dorrlÎnation.
Juan Benet very clearly described an example of this situation in
Spain under Franco, where literature was wholly subject to government
control. lts very dependence was a measure of the monopolistic influ-
ence of neorealist aesthetics, as rnuch among intellectuals who collabo-
rated with the regime as among those who tried to oppose it:
In the 1940s, it was a "right-wing" literature, a "beatific" literature that

supported the Franco regime, a unanimous point of view with no op-
position ... In the 1950S social realism began, a "left-wing" realism

that mimicked the Soviet novel and French existentialism. Very tim-
iclly an opposition literature developed, but without any open criti-
cism of the regirne, of course, because of censorship. W riters took up
themes that were a bit taboo at the time: the nouveau riches, the dif-
ficulties of the working class. 49
Danilo Kis, in an essay on the limits of prose expression originally

published in the Belgrade review Savremenik (The Contemporary) in
the 1970s, evoked the literary atmosphere in Yugoslavia under Tito in
almost the same terms:
There is no dilemma in our subprefecture, everything is clear as day: so

long as one sits at one's desk and depicts the man in the street, the nor-
mal, nice guy, describing how he drinks, beats his wife, how he gets by,
sometimes si ding with the authorities, sometimes opposing them, ev-
erything will be fine. This is what is cailed vivid and committed litera-
ture, this primitive neorealist art that reproduces provincial ways and
_customs, weddings, wakes, burials, murders, abortions, ail supposeclly
in the name of political involvement, of a civilizing spirit and a per-
petuaily new literary renaissance. 50
In literary spaces that are closely monitored by political authorities,

formalism is considered for the most part a luxury to be indulged by
countries in the center, which no longer have to concern themselves
with either the national question or political commitrnent: "The tri-
unlph of engagement/' Kis remarks, "of commitment-to which, we
must admit, we adhere only too often and which stipulates that litera-
ture which is not committed is not litera ture-shows to what extent
politics has penetrated the very pores of our beings, flooded life like a
swamp, made man unidirnensional and poor in spirit, to what extent po-
etry has been defeated, to what extent it has become the privilege of the
ri ch and 'decadent' who can afford the luxury of literature, while the
rest of us ..."51 Thus he describes the dorninance of a nationalliterary
aesthetic imposed in the former Yugoslavia through the combined in-
fluence of native literary tradition, the political regime and national his-
tory, and the political influence of the Soviet Union. Socialist realism
therefore served to reinforce Russian domination of the Serbs: 'Just as
St. Petersburg was a 'window on the world' for Russians at the time of
Peter the Great . . . so Russia is Serb culture's 'window on the world,'
one where two myths converge: pan-Slavism (Orthodoxy) and revolu-

tion, Dostoevsky and the Comintern."52 The structural dependence that
subjects literary practices to political authority is rnarked above aIl by the
repetition and reproduction of the same exclusively national narrative
assurnptions. In other words, this realism, practiced in the name of polit-
ical engagernent, is in reality a literary nationalism whose actual na-
ture-national realisrn-remains obscured.
In South Korea, for example, where allliterature is national, most po-
ets clairn to be realist. 53 Thus Shin Kyong-Nirn (b. I935) publishes col-
lections of poetry in which he identifies himself with aIl those who can
be designated by the term "people" or "masses" ("He is one of them,"
rernarks the French critic and translator Patrick Maurus, "and has devel-
oped the conviction that his role, his duty, is to give voice to their songs
and their stories, however great the sorrow that they express")54 as weIl
as studies and collections of popular songs that he has recorded in order
not only to rnake them more widely known but also to draw inspiration
frorn them in his own writing.
Carlos Fuentes has described the Mexican literature of the I950S in
very sirnilar terms, or at least using a sirnilar vocabulary-nationalisrn,
realisrn, antiforrnalisrn. At that tirrle, he noted in GeograJla de la novela
(Geography of the Novel, I993), the novel had to respond to "three
simplistic requirements, three unnecessary dichotomies that nonetheless
were erected as a dogmatic obstacle to the very possibility of the novel:
first, realism against fantasy, indeed against the imagination; second, na-
tionalism against cosrnopolitanisrn; third, political commitlnent against
formalisll1., against art for art's sake and other forms ofliterary irresponsi-
bility."55 Fuentes' first collection of short stories, Los dias enmascarados
(Masked Days, I954), was naturally condernned as nonrealist, cosmopol-
itan, and irresponsible.
It thus becomes possible to understand how the very content ofliterary

texts is linked to the place in the worldwide structure of national space
from which they emerge. The political dependence of emerging literary
spaces is signaled by the recourse to a functionalist aesthetic and, taking
the criteria ofliterary modernity as a standard of rneasurement, the most
conservative narrative, novelistic, and poetical forms. Conversely, as 1
have tried to show, the autonomy enjoyed by the rnost literary countries
is rnarked chiefly by the depoliticization of literature: the alrnost corn-
pIete disappearance of popular or national themes, the appearance of
The Small Literafures 1 199

"pure" writing-texts that, freed from the obligation to help to develop
a particular national identity, have no social or political "function"-
and, as an aspect of this, the ernergence of formal experimentation,
which is to say of fonns detached from political purpose and unencurn-
bered by nonliterary conceptions of literature. In these countries, the
writer is able to operate beyond the dornain of inspired prophecy and
apart from the function of collective mess enger, of national vates) or seer,
that is assigned to hirn in nonautonornous spaces.
FormaI preoccupations, which is to say specifically literary concerns,
appear in srnallliteratures only in a second phase, when an initial stock
of literary resources has been accumulated and the first international
artists find themselves in a position to challenge the aesthetic assump-
tions associated with realisITl and to exploit the revolutionary advances
achieved at the Greenwich meridian.
KAFKA AND THE CONNECTION WITH POUTICS

Thànks to the extraordinary complexity of the linguistic, national, polit-
ical, cultural, and aesthetic situation that he had to face, but also to the
sophistication of the intellectual and political controversies that this situ-
ation aroused, Franz Kafka was undoubtedly one of the first to under-
stand that sITlallliteratures can (and must) be conceived in terms of a sin-
gle scherna. He said that a unified theory of their relative position and
specifie difficulties might prove illuminating, by identifYing recurrent
patterns in one literature that have gone unperceived in another, and
that questions resolved in the case of one could point to a solution in the
case of another. As a Jewish intellectual born in Prague in the late nine-
teenth century, Kafka came to maturity in a city that lay at the heart of
the national tensions and conflicts being felt within the Austro-Hungar-
ian Empire. Far from being a writer standing outside time and history, as
has usually been claimed, he becarne a spontaneous theoretician, as it
were, of what he himself actually called "small" literatures,56 describing
developments in the nascent Czechoslovakia and within Yiddish politi-
cal and literary movements, which is to say the complex mechanisms
that bring forth all new national literatures. The national question was
not only the rnajor political preoccupation throughout the Austro-
Hungarian Empire between 1850 and 1918; it also greatly influenced
discussion of intellectual and aesthetic problems during the period.
On 25 December 191 1, on the eve of the First World War, Kafka un-

dertook in his diary to describe smallliteratures with a view to exposing
the general mechanisms underlying the ernergence of young national
literatures. He began with an explicit parallel between Yiddish and
Czech literatures, drawing upon his recent discovery of Yiddish the-
ater-which he found dazzling-through the Polish director Isak Lowy:
"What 1 understand of contemporary Jewish literature [cornes] through
Lowy, and of contemporary Czech literature partly through my own in-
sight."57 Indeed, it was his intimate and passionate knowledge of the lit-
erature that was ernerging during these years in his homeland-Max
Brod noted that Kafka "followed up the developrnent of Czech litera-
ture in every detail"58-that enabled him to detect sirnilar characteristics
in Yiddish writings and plays.
He was thus led to insist upon the necessarily political position of
writers in emerging nations-what he called, in an analytical table surn-
marizing his thinking on the subject, the "external connection with
politics"-and proceeded to give a lengthy enurneration of the "bene-
fits" that accornpany the birth of a national literature: the "stirring of
minds, the coherence of national consciousness . . . the pride which a
nation gains from a literature of its own and the support it is afIorded in
the face of the hostile surrounding world." He drew attention to the
parallel birth and development of a national press and publishing indus-
try, but above all to the political importance attached to literature, not-
ing "the birth of a respect for those active in literature ... the acknowl-
edgment of literary events as objects of political solicitude." Literary
texts in these small countries are inevitably produced, Kafka argued,
in proximity with politics: "Even though something is often thought
through calmly, one still does not reach the boundary where it connects
up with similar things, one reaches this boundary soonest in politics, in-
deed, one even strives to see it before it is there, and often sees this limit-
ing boundary everywhere." In other words, individu al concerns rapidly
become collective: every text has a political character, since one seeks to
politicize (which is to say, to nationalize), to shrink the frontier that sep-
arates the subjective-the domain reserved for literature in large coun···
tries-from the collective. But, Kafka hastened to add, the fa ct that "the
inner independence of literature makes the external connection with
politics harmless" results in "the dissernination of literature within a
country on the basis of political slogans."59
In short, for Kafka, who was able directly to observe conternporary

developrnents in Prague, and to whom Lowy recounted in detail every-
thing that was happening in Yiddish literature and the Yiddishist politi-
cal movement inWarsaw, a nascent literature existed only through its
daim to national identity. lts primary characteristic, its very anirnating
spirit, he saw as the product of this constant and constitutive interplay
between its two natures, each of which provides a foundation for the
other. The "national struggle that determines every work" of Yiddish
literature in Warsaw, as he had C01ne to understand sorne weeks earlier,
also defined all the literary enterprises of small countries. 60
Of course, srnalliiteratures could be characterized in this way only on
the basis of an implicit cornparison with the dominant tradition in
Kafka's world: Gerrnan literature. This tradition derived not only frorn
the fact that it was "rich in great talents"-a very dear way of referring
to the German literary heritage-but also from the fact that it treated
elevated subjects-a way of describing literary autonomy. Kafka re-
rnarked (and ernphasized--proof ofhis rare perceptiveness) that new na-
tionalliteratures are also popular literatures. The absence of an autono-
mous literary culture with its own traditions and peculiar concerns
explains why in new spaces, as Kafka observed, "literature is less a con-
cern ofliterary history than of the people." In explicitly stating the filn-
damental difference between literatures that are great by virtue of their
heritage, which is to say their accumulated history, and srnallliteratures,
which are defined by an ambient popular culture, Kafka affirmed the re-
ality of the struggle between the two types of legitimacy described ear-
lier. This is why "what in great literature goes on down below, constitut-
ing a not indispensable cellar of the structure, here takes place in the full
light of day." The inversion of "above" and "below" in the hierarchy of
genres, levels oflanguage, and works is an essential mark, in Kafka 's view,
of sn1all literatures (which occasion "universal delight in the literary
treatment of petty themes"). 61
Finally, Kafka invoked the complex and obligatory relationship main-
tained by every writer from a small country with his nationalliterature:
"For the daim that the national consciousness of a small people makes
on the individual is such that everyone must always be prepared to know
that part of the literature which has come down to him, to support it, to
defend it-to defend it even if he does not know it and support it."62

This obscure and difficult text is not a fully articulated theory, only a se-
ries of notes jotted down in Kafka's journal, his first reflections on a sub-
ject that, as we shall see, was to becorne central to the developrnent of
his entire work. But the true interest of these remarks has to do with the
position Kafka occupied as both witness and actor, a perspective that
was both unusual and valu able owing to his passionate interest in the
y iddishist rnovement of cultural nationalism he discovered through Isak
Lowy, which enabled hirn to see rnatters from both a theoretical and a
practical point of view. As a close and sympathetic observer of events he
came to have a sensitive understanding of the way in which literary
domination was actually experienced, while hoping at the same time to
be able to develop a general explanation for this experience. His intu-
itions therefore serve as an exemplary case study, one that demonstrates
the practical usefulness of theoretical analysis. It is also clear that the fa-
rnous diary entry of 25 December 1911, which has been the object of a
lengthy COIl1.ll1entary by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,63 cannot be
fully appreciated unless it is set in the context of a general model of the
hierarchical structure of the literary world. Kafka hirnself affirrned the
need to speak of srnailliteratures, which is to say of literary worlds that
exist only in their unequal structural relationship to large (" great") liter-
atures; he saw these worlds as inherently politicized, and insisted on
the inevitably political and national character of the texts written in
thern-not in order to deplore or devalue literary productions from
these worlds but, to the contrary, to try to understand their nature and
interest (the "universal delight" they produce) as weil as the mechanisms
that generate them and render them necessary.
Deleuze and Guattari, in rereading Kafka's text, dirninish the spe-
cifically literary character of literature by applying to it-particularly in
connection with the highly arnbiguous notion of "rninor literature"-a
crude and anachronistic interpretation that deforrns his meaning. They
argue that Kafka was a political author ("Everything is political, begin-
ning with the letters to Felice"), 64 though they lirnit their attention
to the 25 Decerrlber 191 l entry in the diary. While it is true that Kafka
had political interests, as his biographer Klaus Wagenbach has demon-
strated,65 they could not have been the ones ascribed to him by Deleuze
and Guattari, whose anachronistic conception of politics leads them into
historical errors. They project upon Kafka their view of politics as sub-

version, or "subversive struggle," whereas for him, in the Prague of the
early twentieth century, it was identified solely with the national ques-
tion. "It is the glory of such a literature to be minor," they write, "which
is to say revolutionary for ailliterature"-noting that '''minor' no longer
characterizes certain literatures; instead [it refers to] the revolutionary
conditions of allliterature called great (or established) ."66 In other words,
Kafka was a political author who had no real political interests, who did
not care about the burning political questions ofhis time.
Failing to grasp the content that Kafka actually gave to the notion of
politics, Deleuze and Guattari are obliged to fail back upon an archaic
conception of the writer in order to justifY their position. Thus they
hold that Kafka was political, but orùy in a prophetie way; he spoke of
poli tics, but orny for the future, as if he foresaw and described events to
come: "He was a political author through and throngh, seer of the future
world"; in his work, the "creative line of flight carries away with it ail
of politics, econornics, bureancracy, and law: it sucks them, like a vam-
pire, to rnake them emit yet unknown sounds, which are from the
near filture-fascism, Stalinism, Americanism, diabolical powers that are
knocking at the door. For expression precedes content and entails it." In
short: "The literary machine thus takes over from the revolutionary ma-
chine to corne."67
The anachronism operates in both directions: on the one hand, in
evoking the figure of the poet as prophet and seer, capable of divining
and announcing events to corne, Deleuze and Guttari reach far back
into the past to retrieve the most archaic of poetical mythologies; on the
other, in identifYing poli tics with revolution, they impose a modern
opinion upon a writer from the past who did not share it. Un able even
to imagine that nationalism was one of Kafka's great political convic-
tions, Deleuze and Guattari create a political and critical catchword-
"nunor literatures"--out of whole cloth and freely attribute it to him.
Their interpretation of Kafka is further proof that anachronism is a form
of literary ethnocentrisrn used by the centers to apply their own aes-
thetic and political categories to texts.

7 1 The Assimilated
At a very early age-in ail the poverty and bareness ofTrinidad, far away, with a population
of half a million-I was given the ambition to write books ... But books are not created just
in the mind. Books are physical objects. To write them, Vou need a certain kind of sensibility;
Vou need a language, and a certain gift of language; and Vou need to possess a particular lit-
erary form. To get your name on the spine of the created physical object, Vou need a vast ap-
paratus outside yourself. You need publishers, editors, designers, printers, binders; booksell-
ers, critics, newspapers, and magazines ... and, of course, buyers and readers ... This kind of
society didn't exist in Trinidad. It was necessary, therefore, if 1was going to be a writer, and
live by my books, to travel out to that kind of society where the writing life was possible. This
meant, for me at that time, going to England. 1was traveling from the periphery, the margin,
to what to me was the center; and it was my hope that, at the center, room would be made
for me.
-V. S. Naipaul, "Our Universal Civilization"
BY DESCRIBING THE dilernrnas, choices, and inventions ofwriters from out-

lying spaces as a set of mutually related positions-the definition of one
being inseparable from that of any other-it becomes possible to recast
the familiar question of the nature and limits of dorninated national lit-
eratures. One of the immediate practical consequences of this method
is that exiled or assimilated authors, who in a sense have disappeared
from their native lands, can now be reintegrated with them. Histories
of Francophone literature in Belgium, for example, devote by far the
greater part of their attention to the founders of the national tradition
and those arnong their successors who thought of themselves as Bel-
gian writers. They generally exclude-or resist including-Marguerite
Yourcenar and Henri Michaux, in the same way that Irish literary histo-
ries hesitate to include George Bernard Shaw and Sarnuel Beckett in
their national panorama, as if mernbership in a literary space by birth
needs subsequently to be reaffirrned. But in fact the form.ation of a liter-
ary space can be understood only in terms of the oHen antagonistic rela-
tion between two possibilities, the hatred that sorne writers feel toward
their horneland and the passionate attachment that it inspires in others.
Just so, nationalliterary space must not be confused with national ter-
ritory. Taking into account every one of the positions that characterizes
a literary space, including those occupied by exiled writers, and re-
garding them as elernents of a coherent whole, helps resolve the false
questions that are posed in connection with snull literatures. For it is
through the interplay between established national positions and the
emergence of autonomous literary positions, which are necessarily in-
ternational, occupied by writers who often are condemned to a sort of
internaI exile (like Juan Benet and Arno Schmidt) or to actual exile
(like James Joyce in Trieste and Paris, Danilo Kis in Paris, and Sahnan
Rushdie in London), that the full complexity of a nationalliterary space
appears.
One speaks today, for example, of Colombian literature and of Co-
lombian writers as if they form a politicoliterary entity that is a recog-
nized reality, sOITlething tangible and obvious that can be uncontrover-
sially described. But owing to the interaction of a great Inany different
figures and factors-internationally celebrated writers su ch as Gabriel
Garcia Marquez, the 1982 Nobel Prize winner, and Alvaro Mutis (b.
1923); national writers such as German Espinosa (b. 1938), themselves
strongly infl.uenced by the stylistic innovations of their more famous
countrymen; the many Colornbian exiles in Europe and other parts of
Latin Anlerica; the proud attachment to Latin Anlerica as a distinct cul-
tural and linguistic world; the importance of Paris as an arbiter and me-
diator; the detour (seductive for Garcia Marquez, repugnant for Mutis)
via Cuban politics; the lure of New York; the power of Barcelona pub-
lishers and literary agents; the stays in Spain; the rivalries and grand po-
litical debates among the best-known Latin American authors to have
come out of the "boom"-Colombian literary space has become a sort
of divided zone that reaches across territorial boundaries, an invisible

laboratory in which a nationalliterature has been created that is irreduc-
ible to the borders of the nation that its authors helped fashion. The
cleavages characteristic of literary spaces that are the furthest removed
from the center and the pattern of their multiple dependencies furnish
perhaps the surest sign of the incongruence ofliterary space and the po-
litical nation, which is to say of the relative autonomy of world literary
space.
It is the cornplex conjunction of a great many positions, graduaily
elaborated and put into play, that crea tes the history of an emergent
literature. These positions construct, and then progressively uni:ty, the
spaces in which they appear, each one representing a stage in the genesis
of a national space. But no newly created position either makes the prior
position outmoded or causes it to disappear; each of them makes the
rules of the game more complex and causes them to evolve, triggering a
contest for literary resources that has the eftèct of enriching the space.
The whole problem in describing the form of these revolts and subver-
sions is that each option or possibility may be simultaneously described
as an initial phase of growth, a structural element, a graduaI process
through which literary history is made, and one among various contem-
porary positions that coexist (and compete with each other) within a
given literary space.
Assimilation, for example, is the lowest level of literary revoIt, the
obligatory itinerary of every apprentice writer from an impoverished re-
gion having no literary resources of its own-for example, a colonized
area prior to the forrnation of a movement for independence or the
proclamation of a distinctive national identity. But it is also an option for
writers from dominated spaces that are nonetheless relatively weil en-
dowed with resources (as, for example, Michaux, a Belgian, and Shaw, an
Irishrnan) who can thus refuse the fate ofbecorning a national writer-
what the Polish novelist Kazirnierz Brandys (I9I6-2000) cailed the "pa-
trio tic duty" of the writer 1-and begin by almost clandestine means to
appropriate the literary heritage of the centers for themselves. In this
way Shaw and Michaux managed to ob tain direct access to the freedom
of form and content that alone authenticates membership in central lit-
erary space. Notwithstanding the fact that those who choose assimila-
tionist exile are apt to disappear from the memory of their homelands,
being absorbed by the dorninant space, with the resuIt that they are for
the most part forgotten or marginalized in nationalliterary histories, this
The Assimilated 1 207

alternative rernains one of fundamental rnechanisrns by which dorni-
nated spaces slowly acquire greater autonomy.
Political assimilation has long been described as a process of fusion and

integration by which an irrunigrant, exile, or dominated population pro-
gressively abandons its religious, cultural, and linguistic diffèrences and
particularities and, forced to accept a subordinate position in its new
country, adopts prevailing customs and practices. A striking passage in
one of the long stories of the Ghetto Comedies (1907), by the English
Jewish writer Israel Zangwill (1864-1926), summarizes the ambiguity
and difficulty of this longing for assimilation, through which the dorni-
nated seek to forget their origins: "There are rnany ways," the narra-
tor says, "of concealing from the Briton your sharne in being related
through a pedigree of three thousand years to Aaron, the High priest of
Israel." Thus Zangwill's character Solornon Cohen had long "distin-
gu5shed himself by his Anglican mispronunciation of Hebrew and his
insistence on a rninister who spoke English and looked like a Christian
clergyman."2
The rabbi who has the appearance of a clergyrnan might weIl be
taken as the paradigm ofliterary assimilation, which likewise (as Ramuz
understood) very often depends on whether or not one has the right ac-
cent. For writers who are utterly without recognized literary resources,
it often represents the sole means of access to literature and literary exis-
tence. One thinks, for example, of the journey of the many Irish play-
wrights who came to London prior to the emergence of a movement of
cultural nationalism in their homeland. Oscar Wilde and George Ber-
nard Shaw were only the latest heirs to a long line of Irish dramatists-
among them, in the eighteenth century, Congreve and his successors,
Farquhar, Goldsmith, and Sheridan-who distinguished themselves in
the genre of comedy. For Joyce, this tradition was a form of historical
dependence that he was determined to escape. Thus in an essay devoted
to Wilde he wrote: "Lady Windermere's Fan took London by storm. In
the tradition of Irish writers of cornedy that runs from the days of
Sheridan and Goldsmith to Bernard Shaw,Wilde became, like them,
court j ester to the English."3
Joyce's famous and brilliant expression at the beginning of Ulysses,
where he proposes the" cracked looking glass of a servant" as the symbol
of Irish art,4 is likewise to be understood as a violent rejection of any

form of assimilation. Indeed, it rnay be taken as applying to the artistic
and cultural productions of ail colonized or otherwise dominated re-
gions. Thus the native art of Ireland, before the birth of the Revival
Movement, was a simple mirror-an image that recalls the imitation
that was first found, it will be recalled, among those whorn du Bellay
condernned as "replasterers of walls," who produce only pale imitations
of the predominant art. But Joyce, in his fury and realism, went still fur-
ther in condernning mimetic practices, rnaking the mirror cracked. The
very dependence of Irish artists made thern unable,Joyce argued, to cre-
ate anything other than a deformed copy of originals. What is more,
they were not even simple imitators; they were no more th an domestics
in the household service of the English, mere maids-an extraordinarily
offensive ide a in the nationalist atrnosphere of lreland in the I92os-
who were incapable of lifting themselves, even in the aesthetic domain,
above the inferior condition that their colonizers had taught them to
believe was naturally theirs. They accepted, in other words, as their sole
identity, the lowly self-irnage imposed by the people who had subju-
gated thern. Thus one understands why assimilation arouses su ch deep
ambivalence in emerging literary spaces: it is at once the prirnary means
of access to literature for writers who lack national resources of their
own and the characteristic form of betrayal in su ch spaces. Artists who
seek assimilation in the center, and so betray the nationalliterary cause,
in a sense cease to belong to their native land.
NAIPAUL: THE NEED TO CONFORM

V S. Naipaul, born on the outer edges of the British Empire, is an out-
standing exarnple of a writer who wholly embraced the dominant liter-
ary values ofhis linguistic region; who, in the absence of any literary tra-
dition in his native country, had no other choice but to try to become
English. Despite ail the suffering, all the discrimination and rejection to
which he found himself exposed on account ofhis background, his cul-
ture, and the color of his skin-an ineradicable reminder of his distance
from the center-he inevitably found himself stranded in a sort of no-
man's-land: neither cornpletely English (despite being knighted by the
queen) nor completely lndian.
Naipaul was born in I932 in the West Indies, in Trinidad, then a Brit-
ish colony. He was the descendant of lndian immigrants, rural labor-
ers recruited around I880 to work the plantations in various parts of
The Assimilated 1 209

the British Empire, induding the Fiji Islands, Mauritius, South Africa
(where Gandhi found an Indian cornrnunity at the end of the century),
Guyana, and Trinidad. 5 Having gone to England on a university schol-
arship, with the intention ofbecorning a writer, Naipaul sought to make
himself a part of English society6-indeed, to embody the most perfect
Englishness.
His book The Enigma of Arrival (1987), published almost forty years
after his arrival in the capital of the empire, is an act of soul-searching, a
disillusioned and moving account of a life spent searching for a definite
and lasting place. "It is one of the saddest books 1 have read in a long
while, its tone one of unbroken rnelancholy," Salman Rushdie wrote
when the book carne out in LondonJ The absence of a literary and cul-
tural tradition peculiar to Trinidad that he could daim for himself and
build upon, and the impossibility of ever filily identifying himself with
India, from which he was separated by two generations and thousands of
miles, made Naipaul the sorrowful personification of dual exile. He
evokes in this book, with the pitiless lucidity of one who has suffered
terribly on account ofhis perceived foreignness, and with a kind of self-
inflicted cruelty that recails Ramuz's account of arriving in Paris more
than seventy years earlier in Raison d'être (1914), his trip from Port of
Spain, the capital ofTrinidad, to Southampton. Made to feel "like a pro-
vincial, from a far corner of the ernpire," Naipaul carne to understand
that he was a "half-lndian," unable to lay daim to the cultural tradition
of India, but at the same time very far removed as weil, by his back-
ground, his education, and the color ofhis skin, from the inteilectual and
literary world of England: "But that half-Indian world, that world re-
moved in time and space from India, and nlysterious to the man, its lan-
guage not even half understood, its religion and religious rites not
grasped, that half-Indian world was the social world the rnan knew."8
Naipaul describes the experience of settling down in the English
countryside, upon completing his studies at Oxford, and his difficult be-
ginnings as a writer. There, in Wiltshire, site of a "second birth," he tried
actually to make himselfEnglish-to understand the landscape, the pass-
ing of the seasons, the history and the life of the people of his adopted
land. "But knowledge carne slowly to me. It was not like the alrnost in-
stinctive knowledge that had corne to me as a child of the plant and
flowers of Trinidad; it was like learning a second language." He recailed
learning in the late spring "to fix that particular season, to give it certain

associations of flower, trees, river." This frenzied desire to belong to a
country, to know its daily intimacies, this way of seizing its history in or-
der to m.ake it his own-"My sense of antiquity, my feeling for the age
of the earth and the oldness of rnan's possession of it, was always with me
... So in tune with the landscape had 1 becorrle, in that solitude, for the
first time in England"-are continually recalled, as though to compen-
sate for an absence, a lack, or what he experienced as one. To put an end
to his condition as a foreigner-defined negatively at first as sorneone
without history, without literature, without country (Trinidad having
not yet achieved independence), without tradition, without a culture of
his own-in short, everything that Inade up what he called his "insecure
past"-he irrlmersed himself in Englishness. 9
No doubt this is what explains his unmistakably English view of the
world, his alrrlOst provocative determination to prove hirnself more Eng-
lish than the English, more nostalgie than his neighbors for the Ernpire
and England's lost power, his pride in proclairrring hinlself the product
of Western civilization. His 1991 essay "Our Universal Civilization"--
whose very title announces an appropriation-is a magnificent illustra-
tion ofhis utter identification with the values of the British Empire. 10 ln
making an apparently objective corrlparison between two types of colo-
nialism, the European and the Muslim, he conderrms the latter and af-
firrns his sense of belonging and his pride in being the product of the
former: "And if 1 have to describe the universal civilization 1 would say
it is the civilization that both gave the pronlpting and the idea of the lit-
erary vocation; and also gave the rneans to fulfill that prorrlpting; the civ-
ilization that enabled me to nlake that journey from the periphery to
the center."ll Naipaul remains faithful to this position, which is at once
conservative, disillusioned, and impossible: the stigma of his own skin
ceaselessly reminds him of his betrayal of his own kind, whom England
had once colonized.
Even his perspective on conterrlporary India-complex, painful, dif-
ficult, and ambivalent-bears the imprint of this strange, sad lucidity
that Inakes hinl see, even in the first stirrings of national independence,
the mark of English heritage. 12 It is this distant proxirnity that allows
hirrl to state paradoxical and unbearable truths. Thus, he writes, "the his-
tory of old India was written by its conquerors"-for the very notions
of country, national heritage, culture, and civilization that were to ani-
mate the Indian nationalist moverrlent came from English conceptions
The AssÎ11lilated 1 2l l
of the world and history. Naipaul himself, as a child in distant Trinidad,
had learned "what Goethe had said about Shaküntaléi] the Sanskrit play
that Sir WilliarnJones had translated in 1789."13
Such are the strange paradoxes and impasses in which a refiIgee frorn
Trinidad was apt to find himself caught up. Naipaul's pessirnistic view of
England's future, his regret at the disappearance of a pastoral landscape
and the decay of country manors, rerninders of ancient grandeur and
de cline, his almost colonial nostalgia for British power-aIl these things
are so many signs of a curious inversion of perspective, of an unqualified
endorsement of a view of the world with which nonetheless he can
never completely align hirnself. The "fàmous Olympian disgust" evoked
by Rushdie, which has led Naipaul in his fiction no less than in hisjour-
nalism to cast a cynical and disenchanted eye upon the countries of the
Third World,14 is also the effect of his position as an assirnilated writer,
as a traitor to the colonized condition, and of his habit of radical skep-
ticism.
Naipaul's deliberate quest for Englishness-rewarded in the end by a
knighthood-naturally disinclined hirn to innovate with regard to liter-
ary form or style. Evidence ofhis political conservatism, a sort ofhyper-
correction (in the linguist's sense) within English political and literary
space, can be found in all his writings. The traditional character of his
stories and novels is the direct consequence of this pathetic search for
identity. Ultimately, to write like an Englishlnan means having to con-
form to the canons of England.
The award to Naipaul of the Nobel Prize in 2001 in a sense com-
pleted the process of assimilation by giving his literary and national
transmutation its highest and n~ost perfect form: an English writer who
has now bec orne universal. Most of aIl, this suprerne recognition allowed
him to "justify" the ambiguities ofhis position, on the strength of which
he claimed to be able to state the truth about the most disenfranchised
peoples of the earth with greater authority than others, while at the
SaITle tinle taking advantage of his membership in both worlds to adopt
the least favorable view possible of these peoples. 15
MICHAUX: WHAT 15 A FOREIGN ER?

The career of Henri Michaux (1899-1984) is in one sense sirnilar to that
of Naipaul, apart frOITI the fact that he did not come from a space that
was dorninated politically: Francophone Belgium was then, as now, a

linguistic dependency of France. Born in Narnur, Michaux refused the
fate of national poets, choosing to forget his Belgian origins (and rnake
thern forgotten by others) in order to becorne a French poet. The fact of
a shared language and, excepting his accent, the absence of external signs
of foreign nationality naturally favored this furtive integration into the
comrnunity of central poets.
As a Wailoon, Michaux was free to choose between the path of
dissimilation, which is to say claiming Belgian regional or national iden-
tity, and assirnilation to French literary space. He did not settle in Paris
until I924. ln cornbination with his accent, which he rnentions in a
poem the following year (and then took care to delete in later versions
of the text)16 and which recalls the "'r's of the other end of Europe" that
Cioran was later to admit tO,17 his cultural distance and otherness placed
him in the curious position of corning across as provincial without the
advantage of seeming foreign.
ln certain of Michaux's writings-Un certain plume (A Certain Plume,
I93 I), Un barbare en Asie (A Barbarian in Asia, I933), Voyage en Grand
Garabagne (Travels in Great Garabagne, I936), and Ailleurs (Elsewhere,
I948)-the ernphasis on distance and discrepancy, the division of the
world into countries and peoples, foreigners and natives, serves not only
to state the premises of a purely literary project. Only a very near neigh-
bor to France, whose accent, manners, and way simply ofbeing betrayed
his status as an odd sort of stranger-someone who was a foreigner
without quite being one and whose very proximity prevented hün frorn
blending in, even though nothing set hirn apart-could imagine divid-
ing up the world into natives and normatives. His parody of ethno-
graphie discourse, notably in Travels in Grand Garabagne, is very close to
what Swift (another Irish "foreigner" assünilated to England) attempted
in Gulliver's Travels. And just as the subversive power and provocation of
Swift's Travels have almost been forgotten, in France at least, Michaux's
Travels have perhaps not been associated with the author's actual situa-
tion as a provincial fascinated by the very fact of foreignness. 18
It was in the com.pany of another faux-Parisian, the Ecuadoran poet
Alfredo Gangotena (I904-I944)-who had come to France from dis-
tant Uruguay in I924 and adopted its language, earning the respect of
the greatest writers of his time and getting published in ail the lead-
ing reviews-that Michaux set out on the famous yearlong journey in
Gangotena's native land that produced his first book, Ecuador (I929).
The AssÎmilated 1 2 13
Michaux's unfashionable determination in this book, which rnany read-
ers found shocking, to resist ail temptations of poetic exoticisrn is more
readily understood if one realizes that his trip was an occasion for verifY-
ing the suspicion that Ecuador was only Gangotena's Belgiurn. It was
their similarity as outsiders fascinated with France, and their comrnon
interest in refusing to glorifY, to grant any reality to the distance-geo-
graphic, linguistic, and cultural-that separated their homelands frorn
Paris, that enabled Michaux to universalize his decentered position. Bi-
lingualisrn also perrnitted them to identifY with each other: Michaux, a
Wailoon, had been educated in Flemish and as a young Inan was in-
trigued by Esperanto, in which he saw a chance to escape the ho Id of
both Flernish and French. He thus established a sort of equivalence
between his hated Belgiurn and Ecuador, a land of literary exile for
Gangotena as weil as his native country.
Evidence of the weight of Belgian identity-experienced by the
yOl~ng Henri Michaux as a curse, a sign of inferiority-can be found in
"Quelques renseignements sur cinquante-neuf années d'existence" (A
Few Particulars concerning Fifty-nine Years of Existence) , a short essay
first published in 1959 in a book of interviews with Robert Bréchon. 19
Although he was now a very farnous author, and despite his reluctance
to divulge biographical details (another trait he shared with Cioran: ex-
iled poets who achieve assimilation in a foreign literary environment
and manage to conceal their origins are naturaily reluctant to recail the
stages of their metamorphosis), Michaux gave a memorable portrait of
himself as a young Belgian poet in a few pithy and precise strokes. He
recailed the importance of his literary training and the cosmopolitan
Belgian reviews that interested him in his youth; but above ail he operùy
acknowledged his resolve to rid himself of his Belgian identity: "Bel-
gium left once and for aU," he remarked, referring to his departure in
1922; frOln 1929 onward, "he traveled against. To expel his country from
hirn, attachments of ail sorts and everything of Greek or Roman or Ger-
manic culture, and ofBelgian habits, that fixed itself in him and in spite
of hün. Voyages of expatriation."20
This explicit rejection of his country constituted the very subject
matter of Michaux's early writings. His attenlpt to disavow what had
been bequeathed to him, to clainl another cultural and literary tradition
and, so far as possible, identifY himself with it, was motivated by a desire
to deny what he saw as his sharneful origins. In the epilogue to Plume (as

the I93 l book was later known) he had vigorously affirn1ed his rejec-
tion of farnilial and national heritage: "1 have lived against my father
(and against rny rnother and against rny grandfather, rny grandmother,
and rrly great-grandparents); for want ofknowing therrl, 1 have not been
able to struggle against more distant ancestors."21
Thus it was, many years later, that he challenged any attempt at na-
tional reappropriation, refusing to be included in anthologies ofBelgian
literature. Michaux's hatred of his name, which cornbined adversion to
his family and rejection of his native land, sprang from a sense that he
bore a special curse. "He continued to sign [his work] with his ordinary
narrle, which he detested," Michaux wrote in "Quelques renseigne-
ments"-a name "of which he was ashan1ed, as though it were a label
containing the words 'inferior quality.' Perhaps he kept it out of loyalty
to his discontent and dissatisfaction. He was therefore never to take
pride in his work, always dragging around with him this bail and chain
placed at the end of each work, thus protecting himself against even a
srrlall sense of triurnph and accornplishment."22
CIORAN: ON THE INCONVENIENCE OF BEING BORN IN ROMANIA

The careers of writers assimilated to the great literary centers constitute
a sort of repertoire of the different types and forms of literary domina-
tion. V. S. Naipaul experienced a political form of donunation, rein-
forced by a literary one; Henri Michaux found himself in a condition of
linguistic and literary dependence. But in the case of E. M. Cioran
(I9I I-I995) the dependence was exclusively literary. Born into a rela-
tively recent and deeply impoverished literary space, but one that was
neither politically nor linguistically dominated by France, Cioran chose
exile far from Romania. He betrayed its national cause to the point of
abandoning his native language in favor of French, electing to integrate
himself in the capital of literature in order to escape the fate of ail writ-
ers from small countries.
When Cioran arrived in France in I937, he already enjoyed a repu-
tation in his own country as a promising young writer, having pub-
lished four books. Two Inore were to follow, including the emblenutic
Îndreptar patima~ (Breviary of the Vanquished, I945). But in France he
was a foreigner-unknown, untranslated, living in extreme poverty. This
fail into anonynùty and the intellectual underclass recalled and rein-
forced his original experience as a writer on the margins of Europe.
TIte Assimilated 1 2l 5
Completing Cioran's personal transfiguration was the decision, ten years
after arriving in France, to adopt French as his literary language-a gen-
uine ordeal, as he later testified: "Changing language at the age of
twenty can still be done without too rnuch difficulty, but at thirty-five,
thirty-six ... For me it was a terrible experience ... The switch to an-
other language can be rnade only at the price of renouncing one 's own
language."23 Cioran's belated rebirth as a French writer rneant having to
strip away all traces ofhis Romanian pasto In order to participate fully in
the rich heritage of French intellectual and literary life, to enjoy a repu-
tation untainted by the infamy of his earlier associations, and to hide
frorrl view the contarnination ofhis "genius" by membership in an ob-
scure nation, Cioran had to eradicate the mernory of his previous exis-
tence. One finds reproduced here almost trait for trait-neglecting, of
course, the nationalist and fascist obsession-the entire career of Henri
Michaux (to whorn Cioran was very close),24 who similarly sought to
erase his Belgian accent, his genealogy, who proclairned his hatred ofhis
farruly, his scorn for heredity, and his disgust for traditional Flemish life,
wishing with all his rrilght to become French and so erase the stigrrla of
his origins.
But Cioran's conversion can be understood only in tenns of his
choice of a style: he did not choose rrlerely to write in French; he chose
to write in the grand style-the language of Racine. This stylistic classi-
cisnl, or hyperclassicism, harkened back to an age when the preemi-
nence of French culture was unchallenged. Cioran sought to regain the
rnoment when the language and literary style of France enjoyed their
highest degree of universal recognition, as though he were trying to re-
store contact with "genius" in its pure state. In this hierarchical concep-
tion of cultures and triumphant classicism may be seen a trace of the
Herderian (or, in the broad sense, German) theories that assull1.ed such
importance in the various small European countries that longed for
independence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Cioran's style-indeed, his entire work-can be regarded as an avatar of
the belief, inherited frOln the eighteenth century, in the superiority of
the France of Louis XIV; a belated incarnation of the classicism with
which the Gerrnans in particular, as we have seen, were determined to
cornpete.
Cioran's concern with transfiguration, with turning himself into a
French writer, his obsession with cultural decadence and failure, and
2I6 1 THE WORLD REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

his national conception of history led hirn first to leave Romania for
France; and then, haughtily ignoring ail his contemporaries and refusing
to acquaint himself with current aesthetic debates and innovations, he
reached back (like Naipaul after him) to a stylistic archaism better suited
to his ideological conservatism. This irnprobable reversion was soon
crowned by success with the publication in 1949 of Précis de décomposi-
tion (A Short History ofDecay), a work that was praised in France partly
on account of the reverence it displayed toward the mernory of national
literary grandeur ("a twentieth-century La Rochefoucauld," as the crit-
ics were later to say), of the homage it represented by a foreigner to an
inteilectual power that felt itself to be in decline. Unsurprisingly per-
haps, rnany critics found the essential ambiguity of Cioran's thought dif-
ficult to grasp. For in and through his work, by means of a sort ofhistor-
ical irony that can be eXplained only if the world of letters is conceived
in international terms, the most conventional images of literary great-
ness, resuscitated by the nationalist irnagination of a Romanian writer
who had made himself more French than the French, came to be
merged with the literary fantasies of a people haunted by their fear of
decline and flattered in their notions of national literary history and
their ITlOst archaic conceptions of style and thought.
RAMUZ: THE IMPOSSIBLE ASSIMILATION

Before becoming the leader of the Renaissance vaudoise, the Swiss writer
Charles Ferdinand Ramuz (1878-1947) had tried for ten long years be-
fore the First WorldWar to crea te a place for himself in Parisian literary
circles--as Henri Michaux was to do after the war-in the hope that, by
achieving recognition as a French novelist, he would be able to conceal
his origins. Yet it was his very proxirnity that prevented him from estab-
lishing himself in Paris: because he spoke French with an accent, he was
too close--too provincial-in the eyes of the consecrating authorities to
be accepted, but not far away enough-not sufficiently foreign, exotic,
new-to arouse their interest. Ramuz hirnself gave a moving account of
his experience as a young provincial poet excluded and rejected by Paris
in a manifesto titled Raison d'être, which constituted both a statement of
editorial purpose of the Cahiers vaudois, the review he founded in 1914
with his friends Edmond Gilliard and Paul Budry on returning to Swit-
zerland, and its first issue.
Raison d'être is a text of capital irnportance for understanding Ramuz's
The Assimilated 1 2l 7
career. It gave expression to his desire to overturn Parisian law and to in-
vert the prevailing order of values-t~ transform what until then had
been a badge of inferiority into a proudly proclairned difference. The
return to the land ofhis birth was the consequence of a quasi-conscious
decision to convert the stigrna of his accent and his provincial rnanners
into an acknowledged identity. Describing life in Paris, he wrote:
l tried in vain to take part in it-I was aware of my clumsiness, which

only made things worse. The embarrassment when one has become
ridiculous (at the age of twenty); one no longer knows how to speak,
not even how to walk. The least differences of intonation, or of accent,
or of attitude are worse than more marked ones and embarrass you
much more. The Englishman remains an Englishman, there's nothing
surprising about an Englishman, he's taken for what he is: whereas l'm
almost the same as those around me, and, wishing to be just the same,
fail short only by a tiny bit, but the gap is terribly obviouS. 25
More than twenty years later, in Paris: Notes d'un vaudois (Paris: Notes
of a Vaudois, I938), he was to return to the therne of the hostility of
Paris and the impossibly difficult choices faced by writers frorn outside
the center. It was, he observed, as though the capital ofliterature was in-
capable of perceiving, much less consecrating and recognizing, anyone
who was not situated at the right distance fronl it:
The provincial in Paris wears the outward look of Paris in the street,
the appearance of Paris ... [He] is anxious above ail not to be taken
for a provincial ... Paris [is] quite hostile, because it seems to exclu de
in advance those who do not belong to it: those who do not model
their appearance on its appearance, their gestures, their intonations,
their facial expressions on its gestures, intonations, and facial expres-
sions ... Either you are from [Paris] or you are not. If you are not,
don't try to give the impression that you are; you will be caught out
sooner or later, with the result ... that the adventure will end in your
expulsion, more or less cunning, but definitive. 26
This remote proxinlÎty crea tes a hybrid character, the false foreigner and
true provincial, the eternal peasant who struggles in vain to create a
place for hinlself in the capital. Ramuz analyzed this condition with
great acuteness and precision, attelnpting to calibrate the exact distance
required in order to have a chance ofbeing noticed by the consecrating
authorities of Paris.What earlier l called "Rarnuz's dileulma" expresses
2I8 1 THE WORlD REPUBLIC OF lETTERS

this very perceptiveness. The strategy that he finally and-what sets
Ramuz apart from other writers-almost consciously adopted in order
to get himself recognized by Paris was one of decisive rupture, exagger-
ating his own differences, and in this way placing just the right distance
between himself and a recalcitrant capital that could not be ignored.
The Assimilated 1 2l 9
8 1 The Rebels
The poverty of the means granted to him is so impossible to imagine that it appears to defy
ail cfedibility. Language, culture, intellectual values, scales of moral values, none of these
gifts that one receives in the cradle are of any possible use to him ... What to do? The thief
gets hold at once of other instruments, ones that have been forged neither for him nor for
the ends that he means to pursue. What matters is that they are within his reach and that he
can bend them to suit his purposes. The language is not his language, the culture is not the
heritage of his ancestors, these turns of thought, these intellectual, ethical categories are not
current in his natural environment. How ambiguous are the weapons at his disposaI!
-Mohammed Dib, "Thief of Fire"
THE SECOND GREAT family of strategies consists of differentiation and

dissimilation, which, at least during the time when a new space is being
founded, are at once literary and nationa1. 1 It is astounding to note, by
the way, that the earliest stages of the international competition inaugu-
rated by the French Pléiade to contest the obligatory use of Latin and
the preeminence of Italian poetry were marked by the appearance of al-
most all the strategies that literary founders were to employ, in essen-
tially unchanged form, over the next four hundred years.
The principal task pioneering writers face is to rnanufacture differ-
ence, for no specifically national resource can be accumulated so long as
literary works are entirely assimilable to the dominant space. The haIt
demanded by du Bellay to the practice of translating the Greek and
Latin classics testified to the fact that the simple transfer of Latin re-
sources into French, without any actual innovation, which is to say
without any increase in the value of vernacular production or any ad-
vertised and proclairned difference, had the consequence of perpetuat-
ing the total domination exercised by the Latin language. Indeed, taking
over the predominant tradition virtually word for word only added to
the patrimony of Latin and accentuated the obviousness of its suprem-
acy. In order to struggle against dependency it is necessary to create a
distinctive identity and in this way, by laying the basis for rivalry and
cOlnpetition, form a literary space.
Ali first-generation representatives of a literature, like du Bellay, un-
derstand both the phenomenon ofliterary annexation by the dominant
spaces to which they are subject and the necessity of creating distance
and difference with respect to these spaces. Thus in 1817, almost three-
quarters of a century before the Irish Revival was formally launched,
Sarrmel Burdy observed that in Ireland "no encouragernent is given to
dorrlestic literature, not only by the governrnent, but even by the people
themselves. For unhappily a prejudice prevails among them against ev-
ery production of their own country, and if any Irishman of talents at-
tain celebrity by his publications, he must have acquired it in England,
and not at home. In fact the people have no opinion of their own in
matters of literature."2 And in 1826 the Irish periodical Bolster's Maga-
zine rerrlarked: "It is the expatriation of national talents that is the cause
of the incontestable impoverishrnent of the rich intellectual resources of
our country ... Sad to remark, in truth, that the talents of which Ireland
has an abundance seem to wilt so long as they have not been trans-
planted and taken on, in the very land that produced them, the appear-
ance of exotic plants."3 The absence of any distinctive identity therefore
prevents native works from being published and achieving recognition.
Only works that are conceived and promoted as national productions
can help put an end to the dependence of writers in relation to the
dorrùnant literary (and political) space.
This is why one finds among many literary founders the same con-
dernnation-vigorously stated in most cases-of imitation. In the chap-
ter of The Difense and Illustration titled "Why the French Language Is
Not as Rich as Greek and Latin," du Bellay attacked those imitative po-
ets who "have left us our language so poor and bare that it has need of
the ornaments and (so to speak) the plumes of other persons."4 This
theme was later to be met with in reworked form in national histories
The Rebels 1 22 l
and cultural contexts quite distant from one another. In "The American
Scholar" (I 837), a document that served as a sort of declaration of intel-
lectual independence for artists of succeeding generations, RalphWaldo
Emerson laid down the gui ding principles of American culture and
literature. Calling imitation a "fatal disservice," Emerson proclairned:
"Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each genera-
tion for the next succeeding . . .We have listened too long to the
courtly rnuses ofEurope."s
Latin America furnishes a teiling example of the same phenomenon:
throughout the nineteenth century, and up until at least the I940s, its
writers produced an imitative literature. ArturoUslar Pietri, one of the
inventors of "magical realism," which was to become in effect the gen-
erative formula of ail Latin Arnerican literature from the I960s on, in-
sisted in his essays on the weight of European influence in Central and
South America, in particular the importance of French romanticisrn. 6
Thus Chateaubriand's Atala (I 80 l )-subtitled "The Love and Con-
stancy of Two Savages in the Desert" and featuring two artificiaily ex-
otie Indians, placed in a false landscape, who fail in love and suffer
according to the most sophisticated conventions of Romantic senti-
mentalism-became an obligatory model and helped shape the tradition
of tropical nativism. The influence of this work was so profound and
long-lasting in Latin America that as late as I879 the Eeuadoran writer
Juan Leon Mera (I832-I894)-who, Uslar Pie tri remarks, lived in a re-
gion having a large indigenous population-"ceased to see the Ecua-
doran Indians with his own eyes, forgot the actual experience of his
whole life, and projected onto the void the false vision of Chateau-
briand."7
It becomes clear, then, why the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier
(I904-I980) was moved to publish a manifesto in Havana in the early
I930S in which he proclaimed the necessity of escaping this state of in-
tellectual subordination and putting an end to a fonn ofliterary produc-
tion that amounted to nothing more than a faithful copy:
In Latin America the enthusiasm for what cornes from Europe gave
rise to a certain spirit of imitation, which has had the deplorable con-
sequence of delaying for a very long time [the development of] our
own means of expression (an evil Unamuno pointed out quite a while
ago). During the nineteenth century we indulged, with a lag of fifteen
or twenty years, in aIl the latest frenzies of the old continent: Roman-

ticism, Parnassism, Symbolism; Rubén Dario began as the spiritual son
of Verlaine just as Herrera Reissig was that of Théodore de Banville
. . . We dreamed of Versailles and the Trianon, with marquises and
abbés, while the lndians were relating marvelous legends in our coun-
tries ... Many American artistic domains live today under the sign of
Gide, if not of Cocteau or simply Lacretelle. This is one of our evils-
we ought to say one of our weaknesses-that we must strenuously re-
sist. But unfortunately it does not suffice to say "Let us break with Eu-
rope" to begin to express ourselves in ways that are genuinely repre-
sentative of the Latin American sensibility. 8
To produce this sort of original expression is to manufacture differ-

ence: each nation creates its own resources. Since the founding of a liter-
ature is therefore related to the founding of a nation, first-generation
writers use all the means at their disposal--whether literary or politico-
national, or both-to gather and concentrate literary wealth. These
means differ according to the initial endOWlTIent of the literary space in
question. In spaces that are relatively well endowed at the outset, the
process of enrichment operates by diverting a central patrimony in vari-
ous ways, through the irnportation of canonized texts and literary tech-
niques, the designation of new nationalliterary capitals, and so on.
In spaces that were the last to develop and therefore the most desti ..·
tute, the great innovation that Herder's theories popularized, and that
modified the whole Set of strategies and solutions to the problem oflit-
erary distance, was the idea of the "people." This notion-along with
those of nation, language, and literature, which, in the system inaugu-
rated by Herder, Were synonyrnous with it---supplied literary founders
with a number of instruments: the collection of popular narratives,
transforrned into national tales and legends; the creation of a national
and popular theater, which rnade it possible at once to enlarge the scope
of the national language, USe folk thelTIeS as material for this theater, and
attract a national audience; the ability to clairn antiquity as a heritage (as
in the cases of Greece and Mexico) and to challenge the dominant mea-
sure of literary time. Rarnuz, who understood this mechanism better
than anyone else, hinlself employed the terrn "capital" in describing dif-
ference as a resource of srnall countries: "Certain countries ... rnatter
only through their differences ... [Yet] they do not manage to make use
of these differences, which are their trUe capital, so as to rnake an irn-
pression at the universal bank of foreign exchange and commerce."9
The Rebels 1 223

LlTERARY USES OF THE PEOPLE
Following Herder, then, nation, language, literature, and the people were
defined as equivalent and interchangeable terms. This identity added a
fourth terrn to a long-standing equation that had been fIxed since du
Bellay, substantially modifying the set of strategies and possibilities, par-
ticularly linguistic ones, available to deprived writers everywhere. The
notion of the people, which Herder had been the first to prornote as
part of a new conception of literature, and therefore of literary capital,
has been a criterion of literary legitimacy ever since, ottering new ways
of producing and affIrrning specifie differences.
The effects of the Herderian revolution were so powerful and so du-
rable that appeal to the spirit of the people has remained an effective
method, despite changes in political context, of achieving access to liter-
ary space. In the nineteenth century, the German model introduced a
vague and diffuse definition: "popular" meant everything that was "na-
tional." But this protean conception, suited to illustrating the most di·-
verse-if not also the most inconsistent-arguments, er~oyed great po-
litical success. To the national (or nationalist) defInition was added, at the
end of the century, the social conception of the people, now defIned as a
social class. Hence the ambiguity: from now on the "people" was not
only another name for a national cornmunity taken as a whole, whose
classic incarnation was a nlythical peasantry, a sort of quintessence of the
nation; it also designated-and these notions were in no way contradic-
tory, but rather cumulative-a part of this national whole, consisting of
the so-called classes populaires, or working classes.
The fluid and polysemous idea of a popular literature (or language)
nonetheless was not inconsistent with the criterion that since Herder
had established literary legitirnacy at the political pole of the interna-
tional republic of letters. Because it perrnitted literary resources to be
accumulated, and because for two centuries the number of deprived
contestants had continued to grow as a result of the progressive enlarge-
lnent of internationalliterary space, this notion caIne to be perpetuated
even as its political uses were imperceptibly being transformed.Writers
both reinvented and reproduced it in a range of different literary, linguis-
tic, and political contexts. The people were not an actual group or entity,
on behalf of which writers acted as spokeslnen; for writers they were
above all a literary (or literary-political) construction, a sort of instru-
rnent of literary and political enlancipation having its own distinctive

use, a way of producing literary difference-and therefore capital-un-
der conditions of great literary destitution. In the early twentieth cen-
tury, the spread of Cornmunist ideology and belief in literary and intel-
lectual circles-and notably among nationalist militants in areas that
were fighting for political independence-favored the appearance of
new political, aesthetic, and literary nonns in the name of which the
popular character ofliterature was to be affirmed.
It is this very notion that in aIl periods gives rise to the first insepara-
bly aesthetic and political rivalries in emerging literary spaces, with each
cornpeting conception of the popular character of literature generating
its own aesthetic and its own literary forms. The first disagreements are
over the "proper" definition of the people and what kinds of literary
works can be said to be popular. In the na me of people as class, sorne in-
tellectuals reject a nationalist definition of the people, thus raising the.
stakes of a debate whose very terms are (and remain) political and, by
placing thenlselves in opposition to political authority, achieving a rela-
tive and paradoxical autonomy.l0
The unfolding of these struggles can be seen in the formation of Irish
literary space. In Ireland the literary renaissance developed at the junc-
ture of two political-literary rnornents, with the passage from Romanti-
cism to realism coinciding with the sernantic and political shift that led
from the idea of the people as nation to that of the people as class. This
shift gave rise in turn to two types of realisnl: the opposition to the ide-
alist aesthetic prOlTIoted by Yeats initially took the fonn of the peasant
realism championed by the Cork Realists, with an urban proletarian re-
alism later being introduced by Sean O'Casey (1880-1964), a nationalist
playwright and one of the first Irish writers to openly affirm his Com-
munist beliefs. This latter transformation, apparently aesthetic but ac-
tually political, rernains to this day one of the last metamorphoses of the
popular-national identity.
NATIONAL TALES, LEGENDS, POETRY, AND THEATER

With the invention of the notions of people and nation by Herder, and
their reinterpretation by the founders of new national literatures, the
popular tales collecte d, edited, reworked, and published by patriotic
writers becanle the first quantifiable resource of a nascent literary space.
The initial purpose of the poets of the Irish Revival, for exarnple, rnay
thus be sumrned up as the recovery, reevaluation, and diffusion of folk-
The Rebels 1 225

tales supposed to express the specific genius of the Irish people and
to exhibit the country's literary wealth. It was as spOkeSlTlen for the
Irish popular genius that Yeats, Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, George
Moore, George Russell (JE), Padraic Colum, John Millington Synge,
James Stephens, and others first carne to be known and recognized. An-
cient legends and traditional narratives, unearthed and ennobled, gradu-
ally came to inspire countless poems, novels, stories, and plays, which in
turn completed the littérisation of these sources in their various forms
(comedy, tragedy, symbolic plays, and rural drarna).
ln countries such as Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century, in
which the rate of illiteracy is high and the written literary tradition lim-
ited or absent altogether, the transposition of oral practices to written
form amounts to an attempt to create literature and thus convert folk
tradition into literary wealth by means of a kind of alchemy, transmuting
popular cultural and linguistic forms-the ritualized expression of cus-
toms and traditions that have not previously been an object of literary
evaluation-into cultural and literary gold. It is an attempt, in other
words, to give these practices a recognized value that permits access to
the literary world. This act of literary transmutation rests mainly on two
types of mechanism: first, as in the case of the Irish revivalists, the collec-
tion of folktales and popular stories; then, often as part of the same pro-
cess, the establishment of a national and popular theater.
In much the same spirit as the great populist and national surveys of
folklore in Europe conducted in the wake of the "philological revolu-
tion" of the nineteenth century, intellectuals and writers in countries
created by decolonization in North and sub-Saharan Africa and in Latin
America began to construct a literary heritage in the twentieth century,
this time on the basis of a new version of the German lTIodel, reshaped
by ethnological research and devoted to measuring, analyzing, and con-
verting into written form popular practices that until then had been de-
prived of national and cultural recognition. In Algeria, for example, nov-
elists conducted ethnological research alongside their literary activities.
One thinks ofMouloud Mammeri (1917-1989), a novelist, anthropolo-
gist, and playwright who first attracted attention as the author of suc-
cessfi.II novels, such as La colline oubliée (The Forgotten Hill, 1952), that
reproduced codified literary models, and who later, in the 1970S and
198os, wrote plays for the theater while also cornpiling a Berber gram-
mar and publishing collections of Berber folktales and old Kabyle po-

etry.ll Other writers, such as Mouloud Feraoun (I9I3-I962), opted for
a quasi-ethnologie al novelistic style: the descriptive naturalism of novels
such as the prizewinning La terre et le sang (Land and Blood, I953) and
Lejils du pauvre (The Son of the Poor Man, 1954) conferred upon them
a quasi-docurnentary interest that approached the ethnological ideal. By
the sarne token, as we have seen, the quest for political independence
brings with it a need to display and increase the nation's literary wealth,
through the adaptation for the stage of the tales and legends (as well as
novels) that constituted its heritage. But in order for this process of lit-
erary accumulation to get started, writers are needed who can deliber-
ately and explicitly transfarm these popular assets into literary rnaterial.
The great novel by the Brazilian writer Mario de Andrade, Macuna{ma
(I928), was thus at once (as the author hirnself affirmed) an "anthology
ofBrazilian folklore" and, as we shall see later in greater detail, a national
novel. 12
The Yoruba tales of Daniel Olorunfemi Fagunwa (19°3-1963), sorne
of which have been translated into English by Wole Soyinka (b. I934),
need to be considered in the same light. Fagunwa was one of the first to
have transcribed the oral tradition of his people into the Yoruba lan-
guage. His first novel, Ogboju-ode ninu igb6 Irunmale (The Skillful Hunter
in the Forest of Spirits, I939), deployed the themes and above ail the
narrative techniques of traditional tales and fables. This "naive" work, a
popular classic and quasi-ethnological document that by 1950 had go ne
through sixteen printings, rapidly achieving popularity arnong the liter-
ate public in Nigeria and a secure place on school reading lists,13 was
raised to the rank of literature and national heritage orùy many years
later through the translation and corrunentary of a future Nobel Prize
winner, hirnself a product of Yoruba tradition, who praised it especiaily
for its "fusion of sound and action."14 Later, the narratives of Amos
Tutuola (1920-1997) in The Palm- Wine Drinkard (1952)-which used a
naively transcribed pidgin English to tell fantastic stories, full of mon-
sters, cruel ghosts, and phantoms that suddeIÙY appeared in the lives of
his characters-were rejected by the first generation of post-indepen-
dence Nigerian intellectuals,15 who, in seeking recognition for them-
selves outside their native country, exhibited a tendency to linguistic
hypercorrection and a preference for the norms of Western narrative.
But these tales were ta be championed first by Soyinka, for whom
Tutuola's use of popular language represented a sort oflimiting case for
The Rebels 1 227

the categories of Western literary understanding: "This wildly sponta-
neous kind of English hit the European critics at their weakest point-
boredom with their own language and the usual quest for new titilla-
tions";16 and then by Ben Okri (b. 1959), a leading representative of the
rnost recent generation of Nigerian writers, who attracted critical notice
in the West with the publication in London of his novel The Pamished
Road (I99I). Okri's book represented a stunning break with the neo-
realism of the Nigerian novel, Inixing a world of ghosts and spirits-
very much in the rnanner of Fagunwa and Tutuola-with careful and
detailed description of contemporary Nigeria. Not only, then, did it em-
body a distinctive and personal view of the world; it also proposed a new
and very original approach to fiction in ernerging literary spaces that re-
lied on indigenous cultural and religious tradition. In this respect Okri's
airns were similar to those of his predecessors, except that he refused to
situate him.self in a mythical past, instead using its tales to describe and
analyze the present.
Dranu occupies an intermediate position between the spoken and writ-

ten language. It is almost universally performed in areas characterized by
high rates of illiteracy and low levels ofliterary capital, such as Ireland in
the early twentieth century and certain African countries today. As the
oral art par excellence, drama is at once a popular genre and an instru-
ment for standardizing the language used in an emerging space. Its per-
fOflTlance is directly related to the rediscovery and affirrnation of tradi-
tional popular narratives: in Ireland, for exarnple, drama was used to
convert folktales into a codified and legitimate literary resource. What is
more, it settles the boundaries of an oral language by giving it written
form and then converting this transcription into declaimed speech hav-
ing literary value. DraIna, in other words, works to transform a popular
audience into a national audience by direct appeal to a nascent literature
that exploits the noblest resources ofliterary art-as Yeats did-while at
the same time casting them in the popular register of the spoken lan-
guage. It is therefore also the literary art that is Inost closely associated
with the concerns and demands that give rise to organized political op-
position and subversive activity.17 ln many newly formed literary spaces,
the accumulation of a popular heritage, the denund for (and reinvention
of) a national language distinct from the language of colonization, and
the founding of a national theater go hand in hand.

The irrunediate and essentiallink between the turn toward dranu and
the calI for a new national language can be apprehended by cornparing
the situation of a smaIlliterature at the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury-the Yiddish literature that Kafka knew-with the experience in
the 1970S and 1980s of a pair of postcolonial writers, frorn different lin-
guis tic areas, whose careers were utterly changed by the decision (for
political and literary reasons) to work in the theater and adopt a new
popular language: Kateb Yacine, an Algerian, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o, a
Kenyan. lB
We have seen that Kafka discovered Yiddish language and culture-

both inextricably bound up with what he himself called the "national
struggle" of eastern European Jews at the beginning of the century-
through the theater. A Yiddish theater troupe passing through Prague
from Poland in 191 l gave him a glimpse not only of the new Jewish
popular literature then being created, but also of a Jewish national and
political rrlOvement that, until then, he did not even know existed. As
with alI nationalliteratures placed in the service of political struggle, the
one Kafka encountered found both expression and an oudet through
the theater, which brought it before a Yiddish-speaking and often illit-
erate public in Europe and the United States. The new Yiddish drama
filled Kafka with enthusiasm for a living popular art endowed with aIl
the attributes (language, tradition, popular legends, and so on) conven-
tionally recognized by national theorists as constituting an "authentic"
national culture. His passionate interest is proof of the impact of drama
on national movements, and by itself furnishes an extraordinary tool for
understanding the form assmued by national ideas that are disseminated
through the theater.
On 6 October 191 l, having seen a play two days earlier (and no doubt
a few performances in 1910 as weIl), Kafka wrote in his journal: "Would
like to see a large Yiddish theater as the production may after aIl suffer
because of the srnall cast and inadequate rehearsal. Also, would like to
know Yiddish literature, which is obviously characterized by an unin-
terrupted tradition ofnational struggle that determines every work. A tradition,
therefore, that pervades no other literature, not even that of the most op-
pressed people."19 Isak Lowy, the troupe's director, introduced Kafka
during the several weeks it was in Prague to Yiddish language and litera-
ture; and even though Kafka did not know Yiddish, the drama written
The Rebels 1 229

and performed in it opened his eyes to a struggle for emancipation that
was indissociably political, linguistic, and literary.
Reliance on drama for political purposes is attested in very different
historie al and political contexts. lndeed, far from being a historically and
culturally specifie event, recourse to the theater is an almost universal
move for founders of literary traditions in enlerging nations. Consider
the case of the Algerian writer Kateb Yacine (1929-1989). Yacine had
been consecrated in Paris as a leading representative of literary moder-
nity and a pioneer of formaI investigation with the appearance of his
novel Nedjma (1956), written in French. A few years later, in 1962, when
Algeria achieved its independence frorn France, he turned his attention
to the political, aesthetic, and linguistic needs of his country's infant lit-
erary space. After a period of exile, he broke cornpletely with his prior
literary activity and for almost two decades, between 1970 and 1987, led
a theater troupe known as Action Culturelle des Travailleurs (Workers'
Cultural Action) that traveled throughout Algeria, helping in this way to
lay the foundations for a new nationalliterature. But in order to do this
he had to renounce a number of prior attachrnents, abandoning formaI
experiments in fiction, converting frorn French to Arabie, and cam-
paigning for a national language freed fronl traditional constraints. For
Yacine it was a question of "making Algerians understand their history"
in their rnain popular languages,20 dialectical Arabie and Tarnashek:
"Given my situation in Algeria," he told an interviewer, "it is obvious
that political problems are at the root of everything, since the country
and society are in the process of being created. Political problems are
paramount-and politics me ans the popular public, the largest public
possible. Since there is a rnessage needing to be transrnitted, it ought to
be addressed to the maximum nurnber of people."21 In other words, the
choice of drama as a form of communication was directly associated
with the new circumstances facing Algerian writers and Yacine's own
change of language. In the wake of independence he sought to reach a
national audience using forms and a language that were familiar to it
and that were at once oral and literary:
How can we make illiteracy disappear? How can we be something

other than writers who talk a little over the heads of their people, who
are obliged to resort to cunning to make themselves understood by

their people, [who are] often obliged to pass through France [to reach
them]? ... This is a political problem ... [The people] like to see and
hear themselves acting on a theater stage. How could they fail to un-
derstand themselves when they speak through their own mouths for
the first time in centuries? ... Mohamed prend ta valise is a spoken play,
three-quarters in Arabic and one-quarter in French. So spoken, in fact,
that l haven't yet even written it. Ail l have is a tape [recording]. 22
The Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o (b. 1938) followed a very

similar route. He began his literary career under the na me James T.
Ngugi and published his first texts in English. His play The Black Hermit
(1968) had been performed in Uganda in 1962, prior to its actual publi-
cation, as part of the country's independence celebrations.With Kenya's
independence the following year he took back his Mrican name and
published a series of novels in English dealing with the issue of national
history and identity: VVéep Not, Child (1964), The River Between (1965), A
Grain cf Wheat (1967). He also directed plays about the major historical
events of the tribal society from which he came. In 1967 he began
teaching at the University of Nairobi, subsequently moving to Makerere
University College in Uganda, where he helped establish an Mrican lit-
erature program. But the political violence that gradually came to dorni-
nate the region, together with extreme forms of political censorship,
blocked the development of autonomous literary activity in his home-
land. Ngugi did not hesitate to denounce the authoritarian regirne of
Jomo Kenyatta, the founder of Kenyan nationalism and president of the
republic from 1964 to 1978. His political involvement then assumed a
radical and specific form: after publishing PetaIs of Blood (1977), he re-
solved to go· back to his roots and work on behalf of the villagers of his
country.23 At the price of having to switch languages-just as Kateb
Yacine had done-he abandoned English for his mother tongue, Ki-
kuyu, and devoted himself to the theater. 24 Following a performance of
his play Ngaahika ndeenda (1 Will Marry When 1 Want) in 1977, he was
arrested and put in jail, where he wrote his first novel in Kikuyu,
Caitaani mutharaba-ini (Devil on the Cross, 1980), notable for its formal
sirnilarities to drama. Released after a year, Ngugi was forced to accept
exile in England, where his prison novel was published in London and
subsequently translated into Swahili and English. 25
Sirnilarly, in Quebec, with the emergence of the first separatist move-
The Rebels 1 23 l
ments (whose leaders saw themselves as victims of English Canadian
colonization), it was a play, Les belles-soeurs, by Michel Tremblay (b.
l 942), that utterly and lastingly changed the rules of the literary garne in
that province. Written in joual,26 it concerned the lives of a group of
working-class women in Montreal, and enjoyed an immediate and re-
sounding success on first being performed in I968. By the sirnple fact
of giving joual written form, so that it could be spoken on the stage
of a theater, Tremblay legitirnized it not only as the language of the
Québécois (and the emblem of the rnovernent for independence) but as
a literary language as well.
LEGACY HUNTING
Alongside the gathering of folktales and legends and the diffusion
(which also amounts to recognition) of vernacular languages through
the theater, other strategies have been deployed by dominated writers in
various historie al and political contexts. A stock of nationalliterary re-
sources can be created only through the diversion and appropriation of
available assets. Thus du Bellay, rejecting the pure and sirnple imitation
of the ancients, counseled "poètes françoys" to recast Latin turns of
phrase in French and, in this way, enrich their language. The meta-
phor that he used to describe this process-of first "devouring" ancient
authors, then "digesting" and "converting" them-was to be adopted
(more precisely, reinvented) du ring the unification of literary space that
took place during the next four centuries by ail those who, lacking re-
sources of their own, sought to divert to their advantage a share of the
existing literary patrimony.27
One way of acquiring literary wealth is through the importation of lit-

erary expertise and techniques, as Alejo Carpentier emphasized in a
serninal text published in June l 93 I. As a young Cuban exile in Paris
(having been aided in his escape frorn Gerardo Machado 's tyrannical re-
gime three years earlier by the French poet Robert Desnos), Carpentier
made the acquaintance of the Surrealists and then sought to develop a
specifically Caribbean and Latin American style, in particular by adapt-
ing Breton's notion of the "merveilleux" to what he was later to call-
on the model ofUslar Pietri's "rnagical realism"-"marvelous reality."28
In an essay published in Cartelas, the Havana review he had edited before
his flight frorn Cuba, Carpentier commented on the first issue ofhis lat-

est project, a Spanish-Ianguage journal published in Paris called Iman
(Magnet) ,29 in terrns that exactly recalled those of du Bellay's Dejènse and
Illustration of the French Language:
Ali art requires a projéssional tradition . . . This is why it is necessary
that the young [artists] of America have a thorough knowledge of the
representative values of modern European art and literature: not in or-
der to undertake the contemptible labor of imitation and to write, as
many do, small novels lac king either warmth or character, copied from
sorne model from beyond the seas, but in order to try to get to
the bottom of techniques, through analysis, and to find methods of
construction capable of translating with greater force our thoughts
and sensibilities as Latin Americans. When Diego Rivera,30 a man in
whom beats the [heart and] soul of an entire continent, tells us: "Pi-
casso is my teacher," this phrase demonstrates that his thinking is not
far from the ideas that l have just laid out. To know exemplary tech-
niques in order to try to acquire a sirnilar expertise and to mobilize
our energies to translate America with the greatest possible intensity:
this ought to be our constant credo for the years to come, even if in
America we do not dispose of a tradition of expertise. 31
Carpentier's appeal for an entirely new direction in Latin American

letters made him at once the leader of the campaign to build a fund of
artistic and literary wealth in Central and South America and its chief
prornoter-a position strengthened by his own emergence in the years
that followed as one of the region's greatest novelists.With the sort of
lucidity peculiar to intellectuals who are torn between two cultures, he
frankly acknowledged the total subjection of Latin America. His rnani-
festo, in announcing the intention to substitute autonomy for subservi-
ence, marked the opening of a new literary area. Sixty years later it was
clear that the cultural revolution it heralded had in fàct been accom-
plished-that Carpentier's text was a self-fulfilling prophecy, proclaim-
ing and thereby bringing about the advent of a literature that was
to achieve not rnerely respectability but honor throughout the world,
crowned by four Nobel Prizes. Its success in developing a style common
to a whole group of writers, and so attaining a genuine aesthetic auton-
orny, is explained by an initial diversion of resources that perrnitted
writers throughout the region to enter into cornpetition and, by pro-
gressively accumulating over several generations the literary capital nec-
essary to underwrite a new literature, to free themselves from subrnis-
The Rebels 1 233

sion to European models. The only way to overcorne the inherent
dependence of Latin America, as Antonio Candido has pointed out, was
to produce works of the first order, influenced by previous national

examples, not by immediate foreign models . . . Brazilian modernism
derived in large part from European vanguard movements. But the
poets of the succeeding generation, in the 1930S and 194os, derived
immediately from the Modernists-as is the case with what is the
fruit of these influences in Carlos Drummond de Andrade or Murilo
Mendes ... This being the case, it is possible to say that Jorge Luis
Borges represents the first case of incontestable original influences, ex-
ercised fully and recognized in the source countries, through a new
mode of conceiving writing. 32
In other words, it is only on the basis of a first stage ofliterary accumula-

tion, itself made possible through a diversion of heritage, that a distinc-
ti\!"e and autonomous literature is able to appear.
"Magical realism" (a term coined only once the new style had already
blossomed) was both a stroke of genius and a strike against international
critical authority. The emergence of an aesthetically coherent body of
writing in Latin America in the late 1960s forced critics in the center to
confront the fact of a genuine literary unity on a continental scale that
until then they had failed to notice. The Nobel Prize awarded to Ga-
briel Garcia Marquez in 1982 only confirmed this unanimous recogni-
tion, foreshadowed by the Swedish Academy's consecration of Miguel
Angel Asturias fifteen years earlier and further emphasized by subse-
quent prizes to Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz.
In retrospect it is plain that events did in fact unfüld according to the
pattern that Carpentier had originally imagined in calling for a distinc-
tive literary style common to all of Central and South America, includ-
ing Cuba and the other Hispanophone islands of the Caribbean. Still
today the special interest of the Latin Arnerican case resides in the con-
centration ofliterary capital not only within a national space but within
a continental one as weIl. The fact that writers faced with political exile
were able to find refuge elsewhere in the continent reinforced its lin-
guistic and cultural unity; indeed, the strategy of the writers (and their
publishers) responsible for the "boom" in Latin Arnerican literature at
the beginning of the 1970S consisted in advertising a regional stylistic
unity, the product (or so it was supposed) of a common Latin American

character. Today one observes the continuing growth of a literary space
on an almost hemispheric scale, with intellectuals and writers engaging
in dialogue and debate across the borders of their native countries, de-
fending political and literary positions that are invariably both national
and continental.
But given the state of linguistic, literary, and cultural destitution in
which certain ernerging spaces find themselves, particularly ones that
have undergone colonization, this inevitable search for a heritage is lia-
ble to take on a moving, even tragic aspect. Thus the AIgerian novelist
Mohan1ll1ed Dib (b. 1920), in the lines quoted at the beginning of this
chapter, described with both poignancy and realism the necessity facing
writers frmn these countries, deprived of any local resources, of carrying
out a diversion of syrnbolic capital by taking up whatever weapons lay to
hand, no matter that they rnay be the products of a foreign culture. 33
THE IMPORTATION OF TEXTS

"In-translation," conceived as annexation and reappropriation of a for-
eign patrinlony, is another way of adding to a fund of literary resources.
This was the path chosen notably by the Romantic movement in Ger-
many. Throughout the nineteenth century, alongside the invention and
nlanufacture of literature as the expression of a national and popular
character, the Germans tried to divert from foreign sources the capital
that they lacked--thus employing, three centuries later, exactly the same
strategy as du Bellay. By exploiting an ancient heritage they were able to
accelerate the process of annexing and nationalizing foreign assets-in
the case of Greek and Roman literature, a huge vein of potential wealth.
The great enterprise of translating the ancient dassics was conceived in
quasi-explicit terms as an appropriation of a universalliterary patrimony
through the importation of these texts into the German language. 34 It
was also an attempt to dispute the daim of French to be the "Latin of
the moderns" and, more generally, to compete with the oldest and rnost
richly endowed literary nations, the only ones until then whose national
dassics enjoyed widespread international renown.
The very fact that this anlbition was described as one of the greatest
tasks facing the Gerrnan nation indicates that the conlpetition also took
the fonn of a continuation of the struggle against Latin inaugurated by
du Bellay in the sixteenth century. The Romantics used the same weap-
ons to pursue the sanle strategy for literary supremacy: by putting into
The Rebels 1 235

effect a whole program for translating the ancient classics into Gennan,
they, too, signaled their intention to fight on the ground of antiquity.35
"Quite independently of our own productions," Goethe observed, "we
have already attained, through the full appropriation of what is foreign to
us, a very high degree of culture";36 and elsewhere, in atone astonish-
ingly similar to that of du Bellay, "The strength of a language is [its
power] not to repel what is fareign, but to devour it."37 Herder, citing
Thomas Abt, assigned a national responsibility ta the translator: "The
aim of the true translator is higher than to Inake foreign works compre-
hensible to readers; this aim puts him on the level of an author, and
Inakes of a small shopkeeper a merchant who lluterially enriches the
state ... These translators could becorne our classic writers."38 And Wal-
ter Benjamin later remarked, as though he was stating sorrlething obvi-
ous: "Next to the translation of Shakespeare, the perrrlanent poetic
achievement of Romanticism was the appropriation of Rornance art
fo~ms for German poetry. In full consciousness, Romanticism strove to-
ward the conquest, cultivation, and purification of these forms."39
The members of the Romantic movement in Germany thus set
themselves the task of making the German language a privileged me-
dium in the market of univers al world exchange, of making German a
literary language. It was necessary, then, first to import into German the
great universal European classics that were missing from the Gerrnan
tradition-Shakespeare, Cervantes, Calder6n, Petrarch-and then to
"civilize" German through the "conquest" of foreign metrics, which is
to say the importation of noble traditions into German poetical forms.
Novalis hoped to be able to thoroughly Gallicize German, including
even its vocabulary;40 but it would be more accurate to speak of a
Grecization of Gerrrlan poeticallanguage through the translation of an-
cient classics, notably Johann Heinrich Voss's translation ofHomer's Od-
yssey (r78r) and fliad (I793). This act ofbringing into the language, and
its literary forms, what was then taken to be a model for all culture was
to permit German to compete with the greatest literary languages. Thus
Goethe ventured to announce as a fact what was yet only a wish: "The
Germans have long been middlemen and sources of mutual recognition.
Whoever understands the German language finds himself in a nurket
where every nation displays its 111erchandise." In one ofhis conversations
with Eckermann, he was still more explicit: "1 do not speak here of

French; it is the language of conversation, and it is particularly indispens-
able when traveling, because everyone understands it, and one can use it
in all countries in place of a good interpreter. But with regard to Greek,
Latin, Italian, and Spanish, we can read the best works of these nations in
Gerrnan translations so good that we have no reason ... to waste time in
the painfullearning oflanguages."41 In launching an irrmlense program
of translation, then, the German language asserted its daim to the tide of
new univers al (which is to say, literary) language.
Frorn this perspective the reason for the appearance of theories of
translation, central in Rornantic thought, is readily apparent: they were
one of the only means for conlpeting on the ground of literary and in-
tellectual antiquity. In order to carry out a collective project of national
enrichment, it was necessary, as a logical matter, to dedare translations
into French of these very Latin and Greek texts to be outrnoded and
thereby to state, in opposition to French practices, a theory of "true"
translation. Advances in historical philology were therefore also, and
without contradiction, instrunlents in the German struggle for nation-
hood. Even the most parochial theories could serve as instruments of
struggle in international literary space. Thus the German theory of
translation, and the practice that flowed fronl it, were founded on a thor-
oughgoing opposition to French tradition. Translation in France du ring
this period, particularly of ancient texts, was done without the least con-
cern for fidelity; the dorrilnant position of French culture encouraged
ethnocentrism, and led translators to annex texts by blindly adapting
them to their own aesthetic. As August Wilhelm von Schlegel remarked,
"It is as though they desired that each foreigner among them behave and
dress in accordance with their custorrlS, which implies that they do no t,
strictly speaking, understand anything foreign."42 In Germany, by con-
trast, in order to oppose the French intellectual tradition, the principle
of fidelity was given a theoretical basis. Thus Herder was to ask: "And
translation? In no case can it be embellished . . . The French, overly
proud of their national taste, make everything conform to it, instead of
adapting themselves to the taste of another period ... But we poor Ger~
mans, by contrast, still deprived of public and country, still free fronl the
tyranny of a national taste, we wish to see this period as it was."43
Moreover, pioneering research into the comparative grarnmar of
Indo-European languages by German linguists and philologists allowed
The Rebels 1 237

the Gernlanic languages to be raised to the same rank of antiquity and
nobility as Latin and Greek. The daim of these languages to a promi-
nent place in the European family, together with the aileged superiority
of the Indo-European languages over ail others, were of incornparable
value in the struggle against French domination. In tacitly accepting the
identification of legitimacy with linguistic and literary antiquity, philol-
ogists filrnished Gernlan authors with scientiflc argurnents. This is not
to say that Gerrnany consciously undertook to enter into rivalry with
France-remarkable though the lucidity of authors from dominated
countries is; only that the study of languages and texts, which during
this period was rnaking huge strides, was partner to a debate that was
taking place within German inteilectual and literary space at the lTIO-
ment of its emergence on the international scene. The new science of
linguistics enabled the German language to pretend to an antiquity, and
therefore a littérarité, that raised it-according to the prevailing hierar-
chi.cal categories of thought and cultural conceptions of the world-to
the level of Latin. The cornbination oftwo modes ofaccumulating liter-
ary capital-via translation and via philology---permitted Germany rap-
idly to join the ranks of European literary powers.
Beyond the importation of literary texts, underprivileged spaces whose

cultural resources reside for the rnost part in the vestiges of a prestigious
ancient civilization, such as Egypt, Iran, and Greece, which had se en
their patrinlOny confiscated by the great modern inteilectual powers,
could also hope to reclaim such resources for thernselves, particularly
national works of which they had been dispossessed. The task of what
might be cailed internaI translation, which is to say bringing the national
language forward from an ancient to a modern state, as in the case of
translations from ancient to modern Greek, is one way of annexing, and
thereby nationalizing, texts that ail the great countries of Europe had
long before declared to be universal, by claiming them as evidence of an
underlying linguistic and cultural continuity. But it might also involve
texts that were unknown beyond the borders of a country on the liter-
ary periphery. Thus Douglas Hyde, for example, through his English
versions of Gaelic popular legends, strongly contributed to the enrich-
ment of Irish literary space-so nmch so, in fact, that these acts of trans-
lation within the native Irish tradition increased national capital in both
languages.

l t is in this context that the critical edition of the Rubâiyât of Omar
Khayyârn (ca. 1050-1 123)-mathematician, astronomer, and poet of the
fifth and sixth centuries of the Hegira-by the Iranian writer Sadiq
Hidayat (1903-195 r) needs to be exarnined. 44 Hidayat's tragic life can
almost stand alone for the terrible situation confronting writers in cul-
turally despoiled countries, condernned to an obscure and difficult life
in the shadows of their literary center. Hidayat-generally agreed to be
the only modern Iranian writer of international reputation-comrnit-
ted suicide in Paris. 45 He had studied at the Sorbonne in the 1920S and
then returned to his homeland, via India, in the early 1940s. In the
rneantime he wrote what today is considered his rnajor work, Bufi
kur (The Blind Owl, 1941), translated into French two years after his
death. 46 "It is the only work in the modern literature of Iran," argues the
critic Youssef Ishagpour, "able to hold its own not only with the dassic
works of Persia, but also with the great books of world literature of this
century."47 Hidayat's fascination with the ancient literature of his land
did not prevent hinl from developing a deep knowledge ofliterature in
the West (he translated Kafka into rnodern Persian); nonetheless he
found himself caught between an inaccessible literary modernity and a
national grandeur that had aIl but disappeared, and so had "the joint ex-
perience of tradition ruined in the present day, and of the present day
through the ruins of tradition."48
Hidayat's analysis of Khayyam's texts, carried out with Western criti-
cal and historical tools, was aimed at restoring the authentic work, free-
ing it from the confusions, approximations, and errors of the rnajority of
previous con1ffientators, who were interested only in uniting it with the
European literary tradition and who as foreigners, lacking a specifically
Persian perspective, failed to see either its unity or its coherence. N one-
theless he made use of Western categories for two reasons: on the one
hand, in order to take issue with the religious tradition ofhis own coun-
try; and, on the other, to dispute the daims of the German philological
tradition, among others, which until then had monopolized scholarly
commentary on Khayyam's work,49 thus dispossessing Iranian literary
space of a dassic whose prestige would otherwise have been credited to
its account in the internationalliterary market.
The work of the South African writer Mazisi Kunene, who has pro-
duced English versions of Zulu epics that he hinlself was the first to
transcribe, derives frorn the same logic. For writers in small nations, in-
The Rebels 1 239

ternal translations are an effective way of gathering together available lit-
erary resources.
AlI these strategies, airned at creating a literary patrimony, amount to so

many ways of making up for lost time. Indeed, it is with respect to the
antiquity of a nation's heritage that the balance of power is the rnost un-
favorable to srnall countries, since literary nobility very largely depends
on how far back their genealogies can be traced. This is why contests
over antiquity-or, what cornes to the sanle thing for societies whose
history has in one way or another been interrupted or suspended, conti-
nuity-are the dassic form assumed by the struggle to accumulate liter-
ary capital. In prodainung the antiquity of their literary foundation and
stressing the continuity of their national history, nations seek to establish
thernselves as legitimate contestants in international competition.
To be recognized as belonging to the oldest literary (and, in the broad
sen~e, cultural) nobility is an honor so ardently desired that even those
nations that are the most richly endowed in literary resources look for
ways of affirrning their historical precedence in order to forestall chal-
lenges to their position. Thus Stefan Collini has noted the insistence of
nineteenth-century historians of English literature on the unbroken
continuity of their nation's literary tradition and the pern1anence and
stability of its language: "continuity," he observes, "is a precondition of
identity and hence of legitimate pride in earlier achievements."50 Thus
the great editor of Old and Middle English texts, W W Skeat, in Ques-
tions jàr Examination in English Literature (r 873), argued that the eyes of
schoolboys "should be opened to the Unity of English, that in English
literature there is an unbroken succession of authors, from the reign of
Alfred to that of Victoria, and that the language which we speak now is
absolutely one in its essence with the language that was spoken in the
days when the English first invaded the island and defeated and over-
whehned its British inhabitants."51
Countries at a relatively great distance frorn the center such as Mex-
ico and Greece that otherwise lnight have invoked a very great cultural
heritage, seeking in this way to improve their position in the world liter-
ary space, were unable to do so because of the discontinuity of their pasto
Neither the modern Mexican nor Greek nation was founded until the
nineteenth century, in each case only after a long period marked by pro-
found historical dislocations that prevented thenl fr01n fully exploiting
the cultural resources to which they belatedly laid daim.

In 1950, with the publication of The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz
tried to provide a foundation for Mexican national identity by restoring
a continuity that had been disrupted-in particular by reconciling its
pre-Colurnbian heritage with the experience of Spanish colonialization
and the social structures that it produced.With this book, which was to
become a national dassic, Paz hoped above all to lead his country to po-
litical and cultural rnodernity by prodairning both its historical continu-
ity and its critical duty to preserve this heritage. Forty years later, in his
speech accepting the Nobel Prize, he continued to affirm what he saw
as an essential element of the constitution and future of Mexico and its
culture: "The temples and gods ofpre-Columbian Mexico may be a pile
of ruins, but the spirit that breathed life into that world has not disap-
peared; it speaks to us in the hermetic language of myth and legend, in
forms of social co-existence, in popular art, in customs. Being a Mexican
writer means listening to the voice of that present-that presence. Lis-
tening to it, speaking with it, deciphering it, expressing it."52
The term "continuity" also appears in the work of the other great
Mexican writer, Carlos Fuentes. Although there are surely few exan1ples
of a historical rupture con1parable to the one caused by the European
discovery of America, Fuentes insisted in El espejo enterrado (The Buried
Mirror, 1992) on the cultural permanence of the continent:
[This cultural heritage] ranges from the stone of Chichén Itzâ and
Machu Picchu to modern Indian influences in painting and architec-
ture. From the baroque art of the colonial era to the contemporary lit-
erature ofJorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Mârquez ... Few cul-
tures in the world possess a comparable richness and continuity . . .
This book is therefore dedicated to a search for the cultural continuity
that can inform and transcend the economic and political disunity and
fragmentation of the Hispanie world. 53
This same aspiration to ennoblement through the reappropriation of

an ancient heritage led Greece at the moment of its emergence as a na-
tion in the mid-nineteenth century to try to reestablish a lost historical
and cultural unity, particularly in reaction to charges by certain German
scholars that modern Greeks did not have a drop of Hellenic blood, that
they were a Slavic "race," and that they had no privileged daim to a her-
itage that did not belong to them in the first place. 54 On the political
level, what was called the Megalè Idea (Great Idea) gave rise to the alTI-
bition of reattaching to the nation territories formerly occupied by its
The Rebels 1 24 l
illustrious Byzantine ancestors-notably arnong thern, of course, Con-
stantinople-in an attempt to restore territorial and historical continu-
ity. Arnong scholars it stimulated historie al studies of folklore and lin-
guistics, and encouraged writers to revert to an aesthetic archaisrn that, it
was felt, would give proof of their Hellenicity. In support of this pro-
gram the historian Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos published a vast and
fanl0us five-volume Historia tou hellenikou ethnous (History of the Greek
Nation, r860-r872) that purported to establish a continuity between
the various periods of Greek history, frorn ancient tirnes through the
Byzantine era and so up until the modern period.
But the Greeks were handicapped in their attempt to enter interna-
tionalliterary cornpetition by the relative advantages in legacy hunting
enjoyed by older countries. The irnportation of the texts of Greek an-
tiquity into the Gernlan language had the effect, as we have seen, of an-
nexing them first to the literary heritage of the Gerrnan nation, and
then to that of Europe as a whole, thereby dispossessing the young
Greek nation of an innnense store of potential wealth. The leading clas-
sicists of the day, the great philologists and historians, were Gerrnan; and
the de-Grecization of the Greeks (as it rnight be called) that they carried
out in the name of science and history was unquestionably a way, at least
in part, of pushing aside anyone who might lay daim to this heritage in
the nanle of exactly that unique national character of which the Ger-
luans were the chief theoreticians.
The strategie effectiveness of proclaiming a nation's literary antiquity is

so great that even the youngest nations hasten to do it. Thus Gertrude
Stein, whose concern with the creation of a distinctively Arnerican lit-
erature 1 have already mentioned, decreed in T!le Autobiography of Alice
B. Toklas (r933):
Gertrude Stein always speaks of America as being now the oldest

country in the world because by the methods of the civil war and the
commercial conceptions that foilowed it America created the twenti-
eth century, and since ail the other countries are now either living or
commencing to be living a twentieth century life, America having be-
gun the creation of the twentieth century in the sixties of the nine-
teenth century is now the oldest country in the world. 55
Here a pseudohistorical syllogism is placed in the service of a sirnple

self-assertion of nobility: faced with the necessity of giving proof of its

national antiquity in order to gain acceptance in the literary world, Stein
fdt that she had no other option than to launch a preemptive strike.
Even Joyce, despite his custornary reluctance in this regard, recalled
the priority and great antiquity of Irish tradition during one of his lec-
tures in Trieste, casting his remarks rhetorically in the form of a denial
whose irony affirmed the existence of a yawning gap between the Irish
cultural nobility and the English common people:
1 do not see the purpose of the bitter invectives against the English de-
spoiler, the disdain for the vast Anglo-Saxon civilization, even though
it is almost entirely a materialistic civilization, nor the empty boasts
that the art of miniature in the ancient Irish books, su ch as the Book
ofKells, the Yellow Book of Lecan, the Book of the Dun Cow, which
date back to a time when England was an uncÎvilized country, is al-
most as old as the Chinese, and that lreland made and exported to Eu-
rope its own fabrics for several generations before the first Fleming ar-
rived in London to teach the English how to make bread. 56
But confronted with the actual difficulties of adducing proof of antiq-

uity, sorne claimants to literary legitimacy sought to enter international
competition by challenging the literary measure of time itself. Thus be-
fore Gertrude Stein, though in much the same spirit, Walt Whitman had
proposed the paradoxical ide a of Arnerican history as a history of the fu-
ture. Unable to draw upon any historical patrimony whose resources he
could then hope to increase, it occurred to him to oppose the present to
the hereafter of modernity; that is, to discount the present in favor of the
future. Ever sinceWhitman, declaring that the present-as the product
and exclusive privilege ofhistory-is no longer an adequate measure of
literary innovation, and setting oneself up as the future, and therefore as
the avant-garde, has been the solution fàvored by American writers ea-
ger to throw off the tutelage of London who have tried to offset Eu-
rope's historical advantages by pronouncing it passé and outmoded.
To have any chance of being noticed and accepted, American writers
needed to contest the temporallaw instituted by Europe by claiming to
be, not behind, but actually ahead of Europe. In this way it became pos-
sible to reject the Old World and relegate it to the pasto It was by setting
the newness, innocence, and unknown adventure of a new world where
anything could happen against the stale and narrow experience of an
Old World in which everything had already been written that a national
literature, or in any case the "Arnericanist" part of Arnerican literary tra-
The Rebels 1 243

dition (as opposed to the "Europeanist" tendency, to recall Octavio Paz's
terms), carne to be constituted. In a fragrnent of Specimen Days (1882-
1883), titled "Mississippi Valley Literature,"Whitrnan inaugurated a long
literary genealogy by declaring:
One's mind needs but a moment's deliberation anywhere in the

United States to see clearly enough that all the prevalent book and li-
brary poets, either as imported from Great Britain, or follow'd and
doppel-gang'd here, are foreign to our States, copiously as they are
read by us all. But to fully understand not only how absolutely in op-
position to our times and lands, and how little and cramp'd, and what
anachronisms and absurdities many of their pages are, for American
purposes, one must dwell or travel awhile in Missouri, Kansas and
Colorado, and get rapport with their people and country. Will the day
ever come-no matter how long deferr'd-when those models and
lay-figures from the British islands-and even the previous traditions
of the classics-will be reminiscences, studies only? The pure breath,
-primitiveness, boundless prodigality and amplitude . . . will they ever
appear in, and in sorne sort form a standard for our poetry and art?57
And earlier, in the "Inscriptions" that preface Leaves of Grass (1855), ded-
icated to the glories of the "NewWorld," he had written: "The Modern
man 1 sing ... 1 project the history of the future."58
ln effect, then, Whitman's strategy consisted in turning over the
hourglass and decreeing himself the creator of the new and the original.
He sought to define his status as an American writer, and the distinc-
tiveness of American literature itself, on the basis of the idea of absolute
novelty: these "inimitable American areas," he wrote, must be able to be
"fused in the alembic of a perfect poem ... altogether our own, without
a trace or taste ofEurope's soil, reminiscence, technicalletter or spirit."59
It is quite clear, too, that his rejection of the central measure of time was
first and forernost a rejection of dependence on London, an affirmation
of political and aesthetic autonomy.
Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, who found himself in a roughly comparable

situation on returning to his native Vaud, in 1914, put yet another strat--
egy into effect. In the absence of any historical or cultural patrimony
peculiar to this part of Switzerland that would have enabled him to
overcorne its disadvantage with respect to literary tinle, he tried to set
history against eternity, the present ofliterary rnodernity against the Ïrn-

rrlObile time of the countryside and rnountains, the eternal present of
agrarian rites and practices. More than an atternpt to defend a national
or regional particularity, the resolute and purposeful return to one's
homeland is very often a way of challenging the legitirnacy of central
criteria of recognition. In order for those who have gone unnoticed to
have a chance of being recognized, it becomes necessary to devalue
these criteria, so that they are seen as relative and changeable, by oppos-
ing them to an absolute and irnrnutable present. Thus the eternal values
of a primordial present are held to be more current than the values-by
definition ephemeral-of Parisian rnodernity. Rarnuz recalled the train
ride that brought him back home to Switzerland frorrl Paris:
l had the opportunity, then, to be able to compare, during the course

of a brief trip, the two essential poles oflife ... which are separated rfrom
each otherJ much more in time than in space) much more by centuries than by
leagues) for here [in the Vaud] was not everything as it had been in the
time of Rome or even before Rome? Here nothing was ever chang-
ing and down there [in Paris] everything was changing, continually
changing. Here there is a sort of absolute, down there everything was
rela tive. 60
In other words, Ramuz reduced spatial distance to a temporal divide and

transformed the objective backwardness of the Vaud into an Ï1mnutabil-
ity similar to that of the rnost distinguished eternity of ail-Rome. He
thus adopted the subtle strategy of classicisrrl: in order to avoid being
condemned to the condition of perpetual anachronism to which the
"rural novel" is evidently liable, Ramuz sought a way to escape froIn
time, to establish hirnself as an artist standing outside tirrle, ever and al-
ways present, eternal, who submits neither to history nor to the vagaries
of modernity-with which in any case he could not pretend to corn-
pete.
THE CREATION OF CAPITALS

One of the essential stages in the accumulation of national literary re-
sources consists in the construction of a literary capital-a symbolic
central bank, as it were, a place where literary credit is concentrated.
Barcelona, historically both the artistic and political center of Catalonia,
united, like Paris and London, the two characteristics that are unar-
guably constitutive of literary capitals: a reputation for politicalliberal-
The Rebels 1 245

isrn and a large concentrated volurne ofliterary capital. The gathering of
literary, artistic, and intellectual resources in Barcelona dates from the
nineteenth century, when the city became a great industrial center. At
the beginning of the twentieth century, Rubén Dario, who found in
Catalonia the support he needed in order to establish modernism in
Spain, 0 bserved: "The tendency that has found expression in recent
years, constituting exactly what is called 'modern' or new thought, has
emerged and triumphed here [in Catalonia] more th an in any other
corner of the Peninsula ... [Catalonians] can be called industrialists,
Catalanists, egotists; the fact is that they are, and remain, Catalonians,
universal."61 Barcelona's preerninence as a cultural capital was associated
with the Eis Quatre Gats group, the architecture of Antoni Gaudi, the
theater of Adriano GuaI, the newly forrned Films Barcelona, and the
thought of the philosopher and novelist Eugenio d'Ors.
In the political sphere, Barcelona stood out as a great republican bas-
tion during the civil war and subsequently as a source of resistance
against Franco's dictatorship, for which Catalonia especially suffered. It
was in Barcelona, too, in the 1960s and 1970S, that a relatively autono-
mous intellectuallife came to be restored toward the end of Franco 's re-
gime. A large nurnber of publishing houses were established in the city,
and the arrivaI of writers, architects, painters, and poets-from Catalonia
and elsewhere-enabled it to combine a national intellectual role with a
political one as a sort of democratic enclave tolerated by the govern-
ment. "In the 1970s," the writer Manuel Vazquez Montalban (b. 1939)
observed, "Barcelona meant-up to a certain point, given the political
context of Spain-democratic inventiveness; the atrnosphere was freer
than in Madrid. And it was then, as now, the rnost important publishing
center in all of Spain and Latin America."62 Barcelona thus becarne the
literary capital of the Spanish-speaking world, allowing Latin American
writers to reaffirm their cultural bonds and gain a European audience
for their writings without political interference. The most famous liter-
ary agent in Spain, Carmen BalcelIs, began her career in Barcelona by
selIing worldwide rights to the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez; and it
was as a result of her efforts and the interest of certain Catalonian pub-
lishers, such as Carlos Barral, that other Latin American novelists were
published in Spain in the 1960s and 1970s.
In recent years novelists have given Barcelona a literary prestige and
artistic existence of its own by presenting it as an element of their

fictions. Vazquez Montalban was the first, füllowed by Eduardo Men-
doza and a cohort of young Castilian and Catalonian writers (includ-
ing Quirn Monz6), to rnake Barcelona a central character in his novels.
Together they accumulated descriptions and evocations of places and
neighborhoods and, in this way, alrnost deliberately constructed a new
literary mythology on the basis of the city itself.
Joyce had proceeded in exactly the same fashion with regard to
Dublin, first in Dubliners and then to a still greater degree in Ulysses.
Here again it was a matter of conferring artistic distinction upon a city
through literary description-we have already considered the role of
descriptions of Paris in creating a literary rnythology-and thereby giv-
ing it a prestige that it lacked. Moreover, for Joyce, to give his nation's
capital a literary existence was also a way to take sides in a national
struggle: by the very act of writing about Dublin he announced his in-
tention to break with the rural and folk norms that until then had dom-
inated Irish literary space. The same process is at work today arnong
Scottish authors. Motivated by cornmon political and literary concerns,
they seek to rehabilitate "Red Glasgow," the working-class capital of
Scotland, and to give it a new literary existence as against Edinburgh, the
rnore "sophisticated" and "civilized" historical capital associated with ail
the clichés of nationalist conservatisrn. 63
In certain national literary spaces, the relative autonorny of literary
authorities can be perceived in the presence of (and rivalry between)
two capitals: one-often the oIder of the two-the seat of administra-
tion, where political and financial authority are concentrated and a con-
servative literature dependent upon national and political power is per-
petuated; the other, often a port city, open to the outside world, or else a
university town, open to foreign ideas, in either case laying clairn to lit-
erary rnodernity and advocating the abandonment of literary models
that are outdated at the literary Greenwich meridian. This general struc-
ture provides a way of understanding the relationship between cities
such as Warsaw and Cracow, Athens and Salonika, Beijing and Shanghai,
Madrid and Barcelona, and Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
THE INTERNATIONAL OF SMALL NATIONS

The special perceptiveness of contestants on the periphery enables them
to detect affinities arnong emerging literary (and political) spaces. Their
shared literary destitution leads thern to take each other as rnodels and
The Rebels 1 247

historical points of reference, to compare their literary situations, and to
apply cornrrlon strategies based on the logic of prior experience. This
logic showed that srnall nations-or rather the international writers of
srnallliteratures-could act in concert to challenge their domination by
the centers. Thus at the beginning of the century Belgium came to be
seen as a sort of model for small countries in Europe. The Irish, in par-
ticular, who were trying to reclairn their own cultural tradition frorn
English control, saw the Belgian example as proof that srnall countries
could succeed in achieving cultural independence. Linguistically, politi-
cally, and religiously divided, and under the cultural dornination of
France, Belgiurn furnished a model for each of the two contending fac-
tions: the Anglo-Irish could identify with the poets Maeterlinck and
Verhaeren, who, although they wrote in French, "were never confused
with French men of letters";64 and the Gaelicizing Irish looked to the
example of Hendrik Conscience, who had undertaken to revive the use
of Flemish. Yeats later met Maeterlinck in Paris and found in hirn a
transposable nl0del: a Francophone Belgian from Flanders who read
German, English, and Dutch, the leader and theoretician of Symbolism,
an innovator in drama and poetry who had made a name for himself in
Paris while refusing to relinquish his ties to his native land-in sum, a
nonnationalist national writer.
A relation of the same type had already come into existence between
Ireland and Norway, which, like Belgiunl a little later, was invoked by
the various warring factions. The example of a small European nation
recently liberated from the colonial yoke imposed several centuries ear-
lier by the Danes that, through the efforts of a small band of writers, had
managed to create a new national language was immediately adopted by
Irish Catholic nationalists in their campaign to bring about the renais-
sance of Gaelic and restrict literary production to plays and novels hav-
ing a national character. 65 Other Irish intellectuals, however, who advo-
cated opening up the country to European culture-Joyce foremost
among them, but also Yeats in a different way-were to use Ibsen's work
as a model for introducing the idea of literary autonomy in Ireland; for
thern, the recognition of the Norwegian playwright in Europe was
proof that a national literature worthy of the name, in order to have a
chance of being recognized on the international level, must cease to

bow down before the canons imposed by religious rnorality and popular
prejudice.Joyce developed a passionate interest in the work of Ibsen at a
very early age,66 identifYing himself with the self.. exiled playwright (his
fascination for Dante was to assume the sarne fonn and strengthen his
attachment to a literary mythology associating the artist with exile) to
the point that Ibsen carne to occupy the central place in art that Parnell
had assumed for him in politics. 67 He even taught himself Dano-N or-
wegian in order to be able to read Ibsen's plays in the original. His first
essay, "Drama and Life" (1900), largely inspired by Shaw's analysis in The
Quintessence oflbsenism and written following an argument with a class-
mate who criticized the decadence of the modern theater and Ibsen's
unhealthy influence upon it, tried to demonstrate Ibsen's superiority to
Shakespeare-a direct assault upon the British national pantheon-and
urged the necessity of promoting realism in dramatic art.Joyce's admira-
tion for Ibsen was thus a form of identification with a playwright frorn a
small country recently liberated froITl political domination, writing in a
language that was alITlOst unknown in Europe, who gave fonn to a new
national literature and at the same time beCaITle the spokesman of the
European avant-garde by revolutionizing the whole of European the-
ater. It is for this reason that Ulysses can be read, among other things, as a
Dublin version of Peer Gynt. 68
Another ofJoyce's early essays was a sharp attack on Yeats's manage-
ITlent of what was to become the Abbey Theatre. "The Day of the
Rabblement" (1901) protested against the nativist orientation of the
Irish Literary Theatre (as it was then known) and its conception of the
people as the repository of legends and traditions needing to be revived
and given literary fonn. 69 In the opening lines of his essay, the young
Joyce placed Ireland alongside Norway: the Irish Literary Theatre, he
wrote, "is the latest movernent of protest against the sterility and false-
hood of the modern stage. Half a century ago the note of protest was ut-
tered in Norway ... Now, your popular devil is rnore dangerous than
your vulgar devil."70 In affirming Ibsen's genius and nlodernity Joyce re-
jected archaizing and conservative attitudes in both politics and litera-
ture while at the same time challenging the nationalisITl of Catholic
theater productions, which were subsequently to proclaim the realist
aesthetic, orùy now for patriotic rather than CosITlOpolitan purposes. His
avowed fascination with Ibsen was therefore a way of affirming his own
The Rebels 1 249

aesthetic and political positions, and he was often to cornpare his dis-
tant attitude toward political nationalisrn with that of the Norwegian
drarnatist.
Earlier, in "Ibsen's New Drama" (I900),]oyce had surnrned up the vi-
olence and the importance of the struggle over Ibsen's work that was
taking place throughout Europe:
Twenty years have passed since Henrik Ibsen wrote A Doll's House)
thereby almost marking an epoch in the history of drama. During
those years his na me has gone abroad through the length and breadth
of two continents, and has provoked more discussion and criticism
th an that of any other living man. He has been upheld as a religious
reformer, a social reformer, a Semitic lover of righteousness, and as a
great dramatist. He has been rigorously denounced as a meddlesome
intruder, a defective artist, an incomprehensible mystic, and, in the elo-
quent words of a certain English critic, "a muck-ferreting dog" ... It
may be questioned whether any man has held so firm an empire over
the thinking world in modern times.7 1
There is, then, a certain reading ofliterary works of which only writ-
ers on the periphery are capable; certain homologies and sirnilarities that
they alone, as a result of their outlying position, are able to discern. What
is more, the interpretation by writers in literarily remote lands of works
produced by authors elsewhere on the periphery is apt to be more real-
istic (that is, rnore historically grounded) than the dehistoricized reading
of critics in the center-a circurnstance that has always been poorly un-
derstood or ignored, since the structure of worldwide literary domina-
tion has itselfbeen poorly understood.
The mutual interest of writers from small countries in each other is as
much literary as it is directly political; or rather, their readings of one an-
other are so many implicit affinnations of a structural sirnilarity between
the literature and politics of srnall countries. The ability of Norway and
Belgiurn to serve as reference points and nl0dels for Ireland was due in
the first place to a political perspective that drew upon a methodical
comparison of national experiences. Irish political theorists, for exam-
pIe, saw Hungarian autononly within the Austrian Empire as a possible
rnodel for Ireland within the British Empire. Thus Arthur Griffith, one
of the founders of the Sinn Fein movement, urged his colleagues to fo1-
low the example of Hungarian deputies in boycotting the Austrian par-

liament, noting that efforts to revive the use of the Magyar tongue had
led to an agreement with the Austrian monarchy on the language issue
and a real measure of political autonomy for HungaryJ2
The success of literary artists frorn small countries who have joined to-
gether to contest the unilateral domination of the centers in achieving
emancipation and recognition suggests that international rnovernents in
painting rnay to SOlne extent develop according to the sarne logic. In
postwar Paris, for example, which was still the capital not only of litera-
ture but also of painting, the Surrealists tried to reassert their dwindling
authority by issuing new excornmunications, notably against the Bel-
gian painters grouped around Magritte.Weary of the rnonopoly on
art and internationalism exercised by the old Surrealist avant-garde, a
srnall group ofBelgian, Danish, and Dutch artists (Christian Dotremont,
Joseph Noiret, Asger Jorn, Karel Appel, Constant Nieuwenhuys, and
Cornelis van Beverloo) resolved to secede and in 1948 signed a mani-
festo in Paris titled La cause était entendue (The Cause Was Understood),
an insolent proclamation of independence-"Paris is no longer the cen·-
ter of art," Dotrernont announced-that marked the founding of a new
community: "It is in a spirit of efficiency that we add to our national ex-
periences a dialectical experience between our groups."73 The acronym
CoBrA was derived from the initialletters of the three cities--Copen-
hagen, Brussels, Amsterdarn-that thus declared their union as new cen-
ters for the invention of an art less steeped in aesthetic seriousness. The
group 's radical challenge to the centrality of Paris may explain, in part,
the insistence of its rnelnbers on the geographic division of the move-
ment, which (as its naIne inlplied) saw itself as an internationalist force
acting in opposition to the concentration of critical authority in one
city. The decentering represented by the movement was therefore evi-
dence ofits modernity and liberty. Thus Noiret spoke of the "geograph-
ical practice of freedOln."74
The alliance of three small countries that acknowledged not only
their cultural kinship but also, more importantly, the similarity of their
position as marginal contestants in the world arena who were rejected
(or, at best, tolerated) by the centers enabled the members of CoBrA to
disregard the injunctions of the Parisian avant-garde. They were angry
and, above all, against: against Paris, against the Surrealists, against André
Breton, against Parisian intellectualisrn, against aesthetic diktats, against
The Rebels 1 25 1
structuralisrn, against the rnonopoly on political dissent ceded to the
Cornrnunist party, and so on. The proclaimed absence of dogmatism, by
deliberate contrast with Breton's aesthetic imperiousness, was itself held
up as a unifYing principle along with the notion that a work of art is an
experiment, always open, forever incomplete; the emphasis on technical
innovations and the use ofapparently ridiculous materials (breadcrurnbs,
rnud, sand, eggshells, wax, and the like); the refllsal to choose between
abstraction and representation ("an abstract art that does not believe in
abstraction," as Jorn characterized the group's orientation);75 and the
preference for collective work as against the cult of singularity. In short,
CoBrA was constructed in alrnost complete opposition to Surrealist
doctrine and the other aesthetic programs th en recognized in Paris:
Kandinsky, socialist realisrn (prornpting Dotrernont and Noiret to enter
into a debate with the editors of the Communist literary journal Les let-
tresfrançaises in 1949), and Mondrian's geometric abstraction. "The unity
of CoBrA," Dotremont liked to say, "does not depend on slogans."76 It
revealed itself instead in a joyously provocative explosion of primary
colors.
The rnembers of CoBrA had always looked to the north for inspira-
tion-no one more th an Christian Dotremont, whose fascination with
the landscape of Scandinavia and Lapland led him to create his "logo·-
glace" and "logoneige" word-pictures. The group's often reaffinned
N ordic character was partly due to recent theoretical advances rnade by
Danish painters. Reviews founded before and during the war, in resis-
tance to the Nazi occupation, and particularly the work ofBauhaus-in-
fluenced theoreticians of abstract art such as Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen-
whose Symboler i abstrakt K'unst (Symbols in Abstract Art) had appeared
in 1933-had a considerable impact on the development of painting and
pictorial thinking in Denmark in the 1930S and 194os. Jorn, as one of
the principal theoreticians of CoBrA, relied on this Dano-Germanic
heritage to give form and coherence to its contrarian spirit, at once seri-
ous and joyful. The attention given to popular art in the first issues of
the group's review, CoBrA, was an affirmation of the North's inalienable
character as much as it was a celebration of inventiveness, vitality, and
universality ("Popular art is the only international art," as Jorn put it).7 7
This spirit of popular freedom, asserted against an artistic elitism that
consecrated a few exceptional beings, was identical with the one that
252 1 THE WORlD REPUBlIC OF LETTERS

anirnated art brut (Dubuffet was a contributor to the group's review) and
insisted on the artistic interest of drawings by children and the insane.
CoBrA's official life was brief: in 195 1, scarcely three years after its
creation, it was decided to put an end to the group's activities. lts mem-
bers pursued their careers independently, and less angrily than when
they had first joined forces. Yet it was their common rejection of the
mandates of Paris, more than their personal ties to each other, that per-
mitted thern during the group 's brief existence to construct a coherent
aesthetic. Shortly after dissolving CoBrA these painters were welcorned,
and their work exhibited, in Paris. Because they had dared to ally them-
selves across national and cultural borders against the omnipotence of
Paris in art, its blessing was eventually bestowed upon theill.
The Rebels 1 253

9 1 The Tragedy of Translated Men
They existed among three impossibilities, which 1just happen to cali linguistic impossibilities.
It is simplest to cali them that. But they might also be called something entirely different.
These are: the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German, the impos-
sibility of writing differently. One might also add a fourth impossibility, the impossibility of
writing ... Thus what resulted was a literature impossible in ail respects.
~Franz Kafka, letter to Max Brod (June 1921)
Writing is a minefield of betrayals. 1betrayed my mother in becoming not an oral poet but a
writer, and a writer in English, which is to say in a language incomprehensible to her; and
not only that, but a writer of political texts, which prevented me from living in 50malia, near
her. 501 thought 1ought to write books that might be considered a monument to the mem-
ory of my mother ... 1regret having written in English, 1regret having not lived in Somalia, 1
regret that Vou, my mother, died before 1could see Vou again. 1hope that my work is good
enough to serve as a eulogy to my mother.
-Naruddin Farah, interview with the author (July 1998)
IT IS INconfronting the question oflanguage that writers froITl outlying

spaces have the occasion to deploy the cOITlplete range of strategies
through which literary differences are affirmed. Language is the major
stake of struggles and rivalries, and also, as the only real rnaterial avail-
able to writers in search of innovation, the specifie resource with--and
against-which solutions to the probleITl of literary domination are in-
vented. Literary revolts and revolutions are therefore incarnated in the
fonns produced by rnanipulating language. Examining the linguistic so-
lutions devised by deprived writers makes it possible not only to analyze
their most sophisticated literary creations, their stylistic choices, and
their formaI inventions-in a word, to rediscover the internal analysis of
texts-but also to understand why it is that the greatest revolutionaries
of literature are to be found among the linguistically dominated, con-
demned to search for ways out frorn destitution and dependence.
Because language is the major component of literary capital, the
reader will find in the pages that follow discussions of a certain number
of solutions that have already been mentioned. Unavoidably, this will re-
quire sorne amount of backtracking and repetition; but in each case I
shail try to ernphasize the specifically linguistic character of the rnecha-
nisms upon which these solutions depend.
In rejecting the "slavish" imitation of ancient texts, du Bellay hoped to

put an end to the quasi-mechanical addition to Latin capital made by
the productions of French poets. The first and chief method that he rec-
ommended-one that has been practiced ever since by writers who find
themse1ves in the same structural position-consisted in asserting a dif-
ference of language through the creation of a vernacular tongue that,
by exploiting the literary forms and privileged themes of a dominant
tongue, could hope to displace it as the new literary language. In the
wake of the French Pléiade, Herder's arguments served only to make
this mechanism explicit, establishing the right to existence of small na-
tions on the basis of the particular character of their popular languages.
This movement was carried on, as we have seen, long after the high tide
of European nationalism in the nineteenth century. Still today it is most
often by appeal to a linguistic criterion that emerging political spaces are
able to proclaim and legitimize their entry into both the political world
and the literary world.
The question oflinguistic difference is faced by ail dominated writers,
regardless of their linguistic and literary distance from the center. Assim-
ilated authors, who stand in a relation of foreignness and insecurity to
the dominant language, seek by a sort of hypercorrection to make the
linguistic traces of their origins disappear, as one does in the case of an
accent.What might be called dissimilated authors, by contrast, whether
or not they have another language at their disposaI, seek by every possi-
ble me ans to distance themse1ves from the dominant language, either by
The Tragedy of Translated Men 1 255

devising a distinctive (and therefore to sorne extent iilegitirnate) use of
this language, or by creating--in some cases recreating-a new national
(and potentiaily literary) language. In other words, the "choices" made
by dorninated writers with regard to language-decisions that are nei-
ther conscious nor calculated-do not consist, as in the great literary na-
tions, in docile submission to a national norrn, even if they largely de-
pend upon nationallinguistic politics. 1 For these writers the dilemma of
language is cornplex, and the solutions that they devise are varied. 2
The range of possibilities open to them depends first on their posi-
tion in literary space and on the literariness of their rnother tongue (or
national language). In other words, depending on the nature oftheir de-
pendence, which is to say whether it is political (and so both linguistic
and literary), linguistic (and so literary as weil), or only literary, they will
search for solutions that, however much they may resemble one another,
are nonetheless very different in their content and their actual chances
of Jeading to visibility and literary existence. In world literary space,
srnall languages can nonexhaustively be classified in four rnain catego-
ries according to their degree of literariness. First there are languages
that are oral or whose script is unsettled and in the pro cess of being es-
tablished. By definition lacking in literary capital (since they have no
written form), they are unknown in international space and unable to
benefit from any translation. This is notably the case of certain African
languages that do not yet have a settled written form, and of certain
creoles that are now beginning, thanks to the efforts of native authors, to
acquire a codified written form and, with it, literary status.
Second, there are languages of recent creation (or recreation) that
with the achievement of political independence became the country's
national language, such as Catalan, Korean, Gaelic, Hebrew, and "new
N orwegian." These languages have few speakers and few literary works;
are farniliar to few polyglots; and, having no tradition of exchange
with other countries, must graduaily acquire an international existence
through translation. Next come languages of ancient culture and tradi~
tion, associated in the modern era with srnail countries, such as Dutch
and Danish, Greek and Persian, that have relatively few speakers, native
or polyglot; and, though they have a relatively irnportant history and siz-
able stock of literary credit, are unrecognized outside their national
boundaries, which is to say unvalued on the world literary luarket.
Finaily, there are languages of broad diffusion such as Arabie, Chinese,

and Hindi that have great internalliterary traditions but nonetheless are
little known and largely unrecognized in the international marketplace.
The constraints of structure and literariness are not the only determi-
nants of linguistic choice among wrÎters. To these must be added their
degree of dependence on the nation. As we have seen, the less endowed
the native literary space, the more dependent writers are politically: they
are subjected to the national "duty" of "defense and illustration," which
is also one of the only routes of emancipation open to them. To the ex-
tent that their choices involve their entire literary purpose and the very
meaning they give to their work, the relation of dominated writers to
their language is singularly difficult, passionate, and, in many cases, ago-
mZlng.
Allliterary authors in smallianguages are therefore faced in one form
or another, and in some sense inevitably, with the question of translation.
As "translated men," they are caught in a dramatic structural contradic-
tion that forces then1 to choose between translation into a literary lan-
guage that cuts them off from their cornpatriots, but that gives them lit-
erary existence, and retreat into a smallianguage that condernns them to
invisibility or else to a purely nationalliterary existence. 3 This very real
tension, on account of which poets who convert to a great literary lan-
guage find themselves sornetimes accused of treason, forces many of
them to seek solutions that are both aesthetic and linguistic. Dual trans-
lation, or self-transcription, is thus a way of reconciling literary irnpera-
tives and national duties. The Francophone Moroccan poet Abdellâtif
Laâbi thus explains:
In translating my own works into Arabie, or having them translated

while always assisting in their translation, I have set myself the task of
bringing them before the publie for whieh they were first intended
and the cultural area that is their true parent ... I feel better now. The
dissemination of my writings in Moroeeo and in the rest of the Arab
world has made me fully reestablish my "legitimacy" as an Arabie au-
thor ... 1 fit into the Arab literary scene to the extent that my works
are judged, eritieized, and appreciated as Arabie texts, independently
of their original version. 4
The atternpts by writers on the periphery to deal with distance and

decentering-notions that are subsumed here un der the generic terrn

"translation," which includes adoption of a dominant language, self-
translation, construction of a dual body of work by me ans of translation
back and forth between two languages, creation and promotion of a na·-
tional and/or popular language, developrnent of a new writing, and
symbiotic merger of two languages (such as the farnous "Brazilian-
ization" of Portuguese achieved by Mario de Andrade, the invention of
a Malagasy French by Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, the Africanization of
English by Chinua Achebe, and Rubén Dano's "mental Gailicism")-
should not be thought of as a set of cut-and-dried solutions sepa-
rate from one another, but rather as a sort of continuum of uncertain
and difficult, sornetimes tragic, responses to their predicament. In other
words, the various ways in which writers seek access to literary recogni-
tion are all of a piece. No clear boundary separates them: ail these solu-
tions to literary domination need to be jointly conceived in terms of
continuity and movement, recognizing that in the course of his career a
wrjter may successively or simultaneously investigate one or more of
these possibilities.
The linguistic situation facing writers in colonized (or newly in-
dependent) countries, who are subject to a threefold domination-
political, linguistic, and literary-and who typically live in bilingual
worlds, such as Rachid Boudjedra, Jean-Joseph Ribearivelo, Ngugi wa
Thiong' 0, andWole Soyinka, is not comparable, even considering its lit-
erary effects, to the sort of domination exercised by the French language.
Sorne European and American writers--Cioran, Kundera, Gangotena,
and Beckett, for example-adopted French as their language for writ-
ing, and others, such as Strindberg, did so temporarily. For writers from
countries that have long been under colonial domination, however, and
for them alone, bilingualism (defined as "embodied" translation) is the
prirnary and indelible mark of political domination. Albert Memmi, in
his account of the contradictions and impasses to which the colonized
in situations of bilingualisnl are liable, described the difference in sym-
bolic value between the two languages-a difference that gives the lin-
guistic and literary dilemma facing writers in dominated languages its
full intensity:
The mother tongue of the colonized [writer] ... has no dignity in [his
own] country or in the concert of peoples. If he wishes to practice a
trade, make a place for himself, exist in public life and in the world, he

must first submit to the language of others, that of the colonizers, his
masters. In the linguistic conflict that goes on inside the colonized
[writer], his mother tongue ends up being humiliated, crushed. And
since this contempt has an objective basis, he ends up sharing it him-
self. 5
For Cioran and Strindberg, by contrast, having been born into small
European languages (ROlTlanian and Swedish) that were relatively un-
recognized literarily but nonetheless endowed with their own traditions
and resources, writing in French, in the one case, and self-translation, in
the other, were ways of achieving literary existence, of escaping both the
invisibility that systenlatically affected writers on the periphery of Eu-
rope and the hold of the national norms that governed their literary
spaces.
The strategies of such writers-which are never implemented in a
wholly conscious way-can therefore be described as sorts of very com-
plex equations, containing two, three, or four unknowns, that take into
account sÏlTIultaneously the literariness of their national language, their
political situation, their degree of involvement in a national struggle,
their determination to achieve recognition in the literary centers, the
ethnocentrism and blindness of these sarne centers, and the necessity of
lTIaking thelTI aware of the difference of authors on the periphery. Only
by examining this strange dialectic, which authors on the periphery
alone understand, is it possible to conlprehend the issue of language in
the dorninated countries of the literary world in all its dimensions-
elTIotional, subjective, individual, collective, political-and how the ex-
perience of each country differs from. that of every other.
THIEVES OF FIRE
We have seen that the centrality and literary credit of a language are
nleasured by the nurnber of polyglots who read it without having to rely
on translations.When literary texts, beyond a nation's borders, are read
by the central authorities only in translation, which is to say when the
central authorities thernselves cannot evaluate such texts in their origi-
nal version, then one is in the presence of a "chronically" translated lan-
guage in the strict sense-one thinks, for exarnple, of Yoruba, Kikuyu,
Am.haric, Gaelic, and Yiddish. In regions of extrerne literary impover-
ishment such as the Somalia ofNuruddin Farah, the Congo ofEmman-
The Tragedy of Tral75lated Men 1 259

uel Dongala, and the Djibouti ofAbdourahrnanWaberi, these and other
novelists-writers in languages that are alrnost nonexistent in the liter-
ary world-manage to exist, paradoxically, only by becoming translated
rnen. They are thus forced to adopt the literary language imported
through colonization-what the Dahonlean (later Togolese) writer
Félix Couchoro (1900-1968) called the "educated foreign language."6
But in this essential and imposed language they produce a body of work
entirely devoted to the defense and illustration of their country and
their people. For them, literary usage of the colonial language is not a
gesture of assimilation. They would surely endorse the words of Kateb
Yacine, who in an 1988 interview remarked: "1 write in French in order
to say to the French that 1 am not French."7
One glirnpses the pathos of their situation in a passage su ch as the fol-
lowing from the novel Maps (1986), by the Somalian English-Ianguage
writer Nuruddin Farah (b. I945): "And 1 grieved at the thought that
millions of us were conquered, and would renuin forever conquered;
millions of us who would relnain a traditional people and an oral people
at that."8 Farah's linguistic situation is particularly complex. In an auto-
biographical essay titled "Childhood of My Schizophrenia" (1990), he
evoked his multilingualism, the product of his belonging to a people
colonized by a colonized people:
We spoke Somali at home, but we read or wrote in other languages:
Arabie (the sacred tongue of the Koran); Amharic, that of the colonial
master, the better to know what he thinks; English, a tongue that
rnight one day afford us entry into a wider world. We moved from one
language universe to another with the disquiet of a tenant on a tem-
porary lease.We were conscious of the complicated state of affairs,
conscious of the fact that we were being brought up not as replicas of
our parents but as a strange new species ... l have remarked on my
people's absence from the roll-call of world history as we were taught
it ... It was with this in rnind that l began writing, in the hope of en-
abling the Somali child at least to characterize his otherness and to
point at himself as the unnamed, the divided other, a schizophrenie
child living in the age of colonial contradiction. 9
Farah, descended frorn a culture of oral tradition, first became an Arabie

writer: the written form of Somali had been settled only very recently,
and it was in Arabie that, as an adolescent, he discovered Victor Hugo
and Dostoevsky and cornposed his first autobiographical essays. But in

the 1960s, upon acquiring a typewriter, he opted for English, th us be-
coming in a sense the first Somalian writer.
Despite great differences in historical and political context, the am-
biguous situation of Gaelic in Ireland in the nineteenth century should
be understood in the sarne terms. The linguistic and cultural nl0vernent
led by the Gaelic League represented an essential moment in the consti-
tution of Irish literary space in the 1890s. But Gaelic accumulated so lit-
de credit following its exhumation by Catholic intellectuals that it did
not succeed, despite its official status as the second national language af. .
ter Ireland won independence in 192 l, in achieving true international
literary existence. At the end of the 1930S, the situation of Irish writers
who had chosen Gaelic was described by one critic in these terrns:
The contemporary Gaelic writer therefore finds himself, more th an

any other, faced with the following dilemma: either never to be pub-
lished; or to please ... not even the public, but the body that inter . .·
poses itselfbetween the public and himself ... It follows that [a writer
of] original, independent, free talent finds himself faced with obstacles
so great that very often he gives up literature altogether and throws
himself, in order to live, into translation; unless he decides to write in
English. lO
It thus becomes clear why many Gaelic writers, playwrights, and poets
were forced to "convert" to English-and, conversely, why there remain
so few Gaelic l11en and wornen ofletters in lreland today.
Sinularly, the South African novelist and literary theorist Njabulo
Ndebele (b. 1948) tried at first to apply Joyce's "stream of consciousness"
narrative technique to the emerging literary language of Zulu in order
to give it currency and to go beyond the simple denunciations of mili-
tant antiapartheid writing, hoping in this way to raise up a language al-
most devoid of literary credit to what he considered to be the highest
point ofliterary modernity, which is to say the norms recognized at the
Greenwich rneridian. But he quickly understood the difficulty of an en-
terprise that, paradoxically, could ob tain literary existence only frorn
English translation. In the absence of any native tradition of modernity,
of any public likely to understand what he was trying to do, of any liter-
ary nlliieu capable of consecrating his work, he saw that this anlbition
was both anachronistic and futile, and subsequendy devoted himself to
developing a specifie and unnlediated style ofblack South African nar-
The Tragedy of Trans la ted Men 1 261

ration in English. 11 Having since becorne one of the rnost celebrated
English-language black writers in South AÜ-ica, he is therefore a trans-
lated author without, however, having passed through the stage of trans-
lation in the strict sense. 12
It nuy also happen that, as a result of colonization and of cultural and
linguistic dorrùnation, the dorrùnated writer has no choice in the rnatter;
that, lac king fluency in the language of his ancestors, the only language
available to him is that ofhis country's colonizers. In this case one rrùght
say that he translates himself-indeed, produces the definitive translation
of his work-in order to gain entry to the literary world. Just as rnany
English-Ianguage writers in Ireland at the beginning of the century had
no Gaelic, nuny Algerian intellectuals either did not know Arabie, or
did not know it weIl enough to rnake it a literary language, when their
country achieved independence in I962.
For_rnany authors, owing to their attachment to their country and their

deterrYÙnation to make it exist politically no less than literarily, the deci-
sion to write in the language of colonization is not without problems.
This all-powerfuilanguage is a sort of poisoned chalice or, better per-
haps, a form of organized robbery. As a consequence of the power of
ideas inherited from Herderian theories (today so thoroughly a part of
national political and cultural thinking that their origins have been for-
gotten), the connection between language, nation, and popular identity
came to seenl necessary, as we have seen, with the result that nonnative
languages came to be regarded as illegitirrlate. The therne of theft, which
so weIl illustra tes this sort of illegitimacy, appears in quite varied histori-
cal and political contexts. "When you are in the situation ofbeing colo-
nized," observed the Algerian writer Jean Amrouche (I906-I962), "you
are required to use this language that has been lent you, but of which
you are only the usufructuary, not the legitimate owner, only a user."13
Elsewhere Amrouche argued that "those among the colonized who
have been able to steep themselves in the great works are aIl not only
coddled heirs, but thieves <if fire. "14 ln appropriating for himself "the
benefit of the language of a civilization ofwhich he is not the legitimate
heir," Amrollche concluded, the intellectual frorn a colonized country
stands revealed as "a sort ofbastard."15
This notion of the theft of language is encountered arnong all lit-
erarily dOrYÙnated authors who have been dispossessed of their own

tongue, notably among thern Kafka, who, as a German-speaking Czech
Jew, stood in the same relation of dispossession, illegitimacy, and insecu-
rity to Gernlan as, for example, Algerian writers did to French. 16 Even
from the pen of Salrnan Rushdie, no matter that he is an integrated fig-
ure in contemporary English literature, consecrated by the London au-
thorities, one finds the same thenle of guilt, which is to say ofbetrayal:
The lndian writer, looking back at lndia, does so through guilt-tinted

spectacles ... Those of us who do use English do so in spite of our
ambiguity towards it, or perhaps because of that, perhaps because we
find in that linguistic struggle a reflection of other struggles taking
place in the real world, struggles between the cultures within Olll"selves
and the influences at work upon our societies. To conquer English
may be to complete the pro cess of making ourselves free. 17
Shakespeare's Tempest has been much cornrnented upon, particularly

in Anglophone countries, as a prophetie play describing in aIl their re-
finement and subtlety the mechanisms of colonization and subjugation
(a circumstance that in itself furnishes an excellent practical example of
the diversion and appropriation of the colonizer's noblest literary cap-
ital).18 The theory of the poisoned chalice has been widely debated in
connection with the outburst by Caliban, who, in response to his master
Prospero's statement,
1 pitied thee, took pains to rnake thee speak,

... When thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own lTleaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, 1 endowed thy purposes
With words that made them known
replied:
You taught me language, and lTly profit on't

Is, 1 know how to curse. The red plagne rid you
For learning me your languageP9
The fundarnental ambivalence inherent in this structure of domination

explains the irnportance of debates over the linguistic issue, and the vio-
lence of the passions they arouse, which divide aIl the small nations of
the literary world.
It is true that the use of a dominant language is paradoxical and con-

tradictory, for it is as nluch alienating as it is liberating. First-generation
authors, such as R. K. Narayan (1906-2001) in lndia and Mouloud
Marnrneri in Algeria, in the absence of any specific national capital, of-
ten made use of a "hypercorrect" language in conjunction with very
traditionalliterary forrns and aesthetics. 20 Because their double illegiti-
macy (vis-à-vis both national and central norrns) cornrrlÏtted them to
the nl0st orthodox uses of language and literature, which is to say to the
least innovative and therefore the least literary practices, they sought to
reconcile a position of national combat (to recail Kafka's phrase) with
the literary use of the dorrünant language in which they wrote and
in reaction against which they constructed a sense of literary identity.
Using the language of donlination, they tried to produce a literature
that, rnirroring the one that was imposed by colonial authorities, could
be assirrülated as part of the nationalliterary heritage.
But when a literary space has acquired a certain rrleasure of auton-
on~y, the literary use of one of the great central languages becomes for
dorrünated writers a guarantee of inlinediate merrlbership in the literary
world and ailows the appropriation of a whole stock of technical knowl-
edge and expertise. Those who "choose" to write in a dorrlÏnant lan-
guage are able, in effect, to take a shortcut on the road to literary status.
And since their use of a ri ch language and the aesthetic categories asso-
ciated with it makes them inlinediately Inore visible, more in confor-
rnity with prevailing literary nornlS, they are also the first to ob tain in-
ternational recognition. Thus, in Ireland, Yeats very quickly earned the
approval of the critical authorities in London, which ailowed him to es-
tablish himself as a leading figure by contrast with poets who had chosen
to write in Gaelic. Similarly, the Catalonian writers who are today
the best known on the international scene are those who write in
Castilian-notably Manuel Vazquez Montalban, Eduardo Mendoza,
and Felix de Azua. Rushdie hirrlself, famous and celebrated even before
thefatwa that was pronounced against him, is one of the best-known ln-
dian writers in England. He explicitly recognizes that "rnajor work is
being do ne in lndia in rrlany languages other th an English; yet outside
lndia there is just about no interest in any of this work. The lndo-
Anglians seize ail the limelight ... 'Comrnonwealth literature' is not in-
terested in such nlatters."21
Despite its rrlany arnbiguous usages, then, the central language can be
claimed by dorrlÏnated writers as their own property on the condition

that the curse of an irnpossible heritage can be turned against itself Just
as Joyce (who lived in a rather sirnilar colonial-Iater postcolonial-sit-
uation) regarded the English language not as the patent sign of domina-
tion, but as the rightful property of his people, Rushdie holds that the
"English language ceased to be the sole possession of the English sorne
time ago."22 Moreover, he points out, the "British lndian writer simply
does not have the option of rejecting English, anyway ... in the forging
of a British lndian identity the English language is of central impor-
tance. It rnust, in spite of everything, be embraced."23 Just so, the "chil-
dren of independent lndia seern not to think of English as being irre-
deernably tainted by its colonial provenance. They use it as an Indian
language, as one of the tools they have to hand."24
TRANSLATED FROM THE NIGHT

When a peripherallanguage has acquired at least sorne resources of its
own, one sees the emergence-and this is a path very close to the one
just discussed-of literary artists who set themselves the task of produc-
ing a dual body of work, rnaintaining a complex and painfully difEcult
position between two languages in the process. These "digraphie" texts,
as Alain Ricard has suggested they be caIled, are written at once in both
of the writer's languages, the mother tongue and that of colonization,
and follow a complicated trajectory of translations, transcriptions, and
self-translations. 25 This perrnanent double writing constitutes the sub-
strate, the driving force, the dialectic, and often even the subject of su ch
works.
In the case of the Ivory Coast writer Ahmadou Kourouma (b. I927),
who wrote his great novel Les soleils des indépendances (Suns of lnde-
pendence, l 969) on the basis of a sort of French translation frorn the
Malinke language,26 the novelty and subversive character of his enter-
prise depended in large part on his refusaI to treat French with the cus-
tomary respect, his disregard of "proper" usage, and his creation of a hy-
brid literary language through what might be called the Mahnkization
of French.
Among Francophone writers, one of the first to experirnent with
this dual nl0de of expession was the Madagascar poet Jean-Joseph
Rabearivelo (I90I-I937). An autodidact who revered the great French
poets of the late nineteenth century-the Parnassians, then Baudelaire
and the Symbolists, aIl of whorn he had discovered by himself-
'DIe Tragedy of Translated Men 1 26 5

Rabearivelo constructed his work in a sort of pennanent shuttling back
and forth, a kind of reciprocal translation between French and Malagasy.
Since the nineteenth century there had existed in Madagascar a stan-
dardized written language that permitted the emergence of a true Mala-
gasy poetry, for which Rabearivelo carne to develop a passionate feeling.
He began his career with a number of articles and essays on the necessity
of prornoting this culture, and subsequendy translated into French the
works of both ancient and rnodern Malagasy authors, collected two
years after his death under the title Les vieilles chansons des pays d) Imerina
(The Old Songs of the Lands oflmerina, I939), a volume that displays a
univers al strategy for building a fund of national literary capital. Con-
versely, and for the same reason, he sought to rnake known in his coun-
try not only Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Laforgue, and Verlaine but also Rilke,
Whitrnan, and Tagore, and hünself translated Valéry into Malagasy. He
next published in French, in both Tananarive (now Antananarivo) and
Tunis,27 what were to bec orne his most celebrated collections of poetry,
Presque-songes (Almost DreaIT1S, I934) and Traduit de la nuit (Translated
from the Night, I935), the latter subtided "Poerns Transcribed frmn the
Hova by the Author."28 Critics, mindful of the distinctive talent and
originality required for a poet to be consecrated, were nluch exercised
over the question whether these were genuine translations, and inquired
after the original version of the texts on which they were based.
The importance of traditional literature, particularly the hain-teny
described sorne twenty years earlier by Jean Paulhan, is obvious in
Rabearivelo 's writing,29 which, accordingly, sought to go beyond the
usual distinction between collective and individual creation. But
Rabearivelo also created a new sort of language, a manner of writing
Malagasy in French-rnuch like Rubén Dano's "lnental Gallicisnl"-
that yielded a genuinely trans-lated text in which each component was
brought over through the other. Rabearivelo wrote neither in French
nor in Malagasy, but in an intermediate idiom derived fimn a continual
passing back and forth between the two languages. The tide ofhis I935
collection, "Translated frorn the Night," is a magnificent Inetaphor for
this almost impossible translation, snatched from the obscurity of an al-
IT10St unknown tongue, and so attesting at once to its literary existence
and to its literary weakness. Rather than take the ennobling path of as-
similation, Rabearivelo had the daring to atternpt something unprece-
dented, setting himself in opposition, on the one hand, to his country's

nationalists, for whom such an enterprise was a betrayal of the Malagasy
language and its poetry, and, on the other, to the norms of proper usage
and of French academic poetry-the da ring, in short, to invent a Mala-
gasy poetry (and language) in French. Rabearivelo succeeded in this
arnbition, renouncing neither his original language nor the literary lan-
guage, which for hirn was the language of his country's eolonizers.
His work was recognized in Paris quite rapidly, earning a place in Léo-
pold Sédar Senghor's Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de
la langue française (Anthology of New Black and Malagasy Poetry in
French, I948), which eontained a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. But by
then he was dead, having committed suicide more than a decade earlier,
in I937, without ever having been able to ob tain permission from the
colonial administration to visit France.
COMINGS AND GOINGS

The various options available to writers in "ehoosing" a literary lan-
guage are sometimes so hard to dissociate that it makes rnore sense to
analyze them as elements of a single continuous series of strategies.
Linguistic irnbalance-the sort of imbalance farniliar to a tightrope
walker-is inherent in these positions, which are at once difficult, mar-
ginal, and prodigiously fertile. The choice of one or another option, the
passing back and forth from one language to another, gives rise to wa-
vering, hesitations, regrets, and steps backward. They are not clear-cut
choices, but rather a series of possibilities that are dependent on political
and literary constraints and on the development of a writer's career
(which is to say the degree of national and international recognition his
work enjoys).
When a dominated language has an autonomous literary existence,
the sarne writer may experiment successively with various routes of ac-
cess to literature. The Algerian Rachid Boudjedra (b. I94I), for example,
is the author of works written first in French that he then translated
himself into Arabic; and also of texts written in Arabic that were then
translated into French. Boudjedra is therefore a digraphic author, since
he operates continually between two languages, subject to the tension of
translation, itself an essential element of his work. His first novels com-
posed in French, La répudiation (The Repudiation, I969) and L'insolation
(Sunstroke, I972), won him wide recognition. He then translated the
second of these two French novels into Arabie, thus transforming his re-
The Tragedy cf Translated Mm 1 267

lationship to the Algerian public: having been consecrated in France, he
could now be read in the language of his own country. But, as he ex-
plained, the social and literary norrns were not the same in Algeria:
In French [the book] didn't cause a stir. In Algeria, people read it, and
when 1 translated it into Arabie there was a terrible outcry against me,
precisely because 1 had chailenged the sacred text, 1 had made puns on
the Koranic text and so on . . . the whole subversive thrust comes
through better in Arabie ... 1 wrote in French when 1 was in France
because otherwise 1 wouldn't have found a publisher. Frankly, l'il teil
you straight out, l'm very fond of French, it's been of enormous ser-
vice to me-I've written six novels in it and l've got an international
reputation and l've been translated in some fifteen countries thanks to
this language. Then 1 changed over to Arabie, and that also coincided
with the rise of an Arab-speaking generation that has gone to school
and no longer speaks French ... But 1 take part in the translation [of
my work] into French. There is a translator and 1 insist on working
-with him on the translation, because it has to be by Boudjedra, like the
days when 1 wrote in French. 3D
The porousness between two languages rnade possible by bilingualism

therefore encourages a perpetuaI transit back and forth between them
and produces a succession of linguistic and national reappropriations.
Fictional purpose is searnlessly inscribed and constituted in this sense of
belonging to two languages.
The case of the South African Zulu poet Mazisi Kunene (b. I930) is
very similar to that of Boudjedra. As a writer involved in the struggle
against apartheid who served as the representative of the African Na-
tional Congress to the United Nations in the I960s, he started out col-
lecting and analyzing traditional Zulu poetry, la ter creating works ofhis
own in Zulu.Working with poems from the oral tradition, he com-
posed epics that recounted the memory of his people and translated
them himself into English, publishing these versions in London, notably
Zulu Poems (I970) and The Ancestors and the Sacred Mountains (I982).
Unquestionably his most important work is Emperor Shaka the Great
(I979), an epic poem in seventeen books. His decision to write in Zulu,
together with a faithfulness to the forms of oral culture, perrnitted him
to reconcile participation in national politics and the need for inter-
national recognition. His countryman André Brink (b. I935), heir as
a white Afrikaner to another marginal language in the sarne literary

world, likewise chose self-translation. He composed his first novels in
Afrikaans and then, after the banning of his book Kénnis van die Aand
(Looking on Darkness, 1973) by the South African regirne in 1974, be-
gan to translate his own books into English. This exchange oflanguages,
which alTIounted to a license to travel beyond the borders ofhis country,
enabled him to achieve international recognition.
KAFKA: TRANSLATED FROM YIDDISH

Against all appearances and contrary to the most common critical as-
surnptions regarding his work, Franz Kafka clearly belongs to this sarne
fan~ily of cases. One might in fact describe Kafka's whole literary enter-
prise as a rnormrrlent raised to the glory of Yiddish, the lost and forgot-
ten language of the Western Jews, and his work as consisting in a de-
spairing practice of Gern~an, the language ofJewish assimilation and the
language of those who, by encouraging this assimilation, succeeded in
rnaking the Jews of Prague (and more generally of western Europe as a
whole) forget their own culture. German was a "stolen" language whose
use Kafka persisted in regarding as illegitimate. In this sense his work can
be considered as entirely translated frorrl a language that he could not
write, Yiddish.
As a native of Prague, as a Jew, and as an intellectual, Franz Kafka oc-
cupied a very complex place in the political and literary life ofhis time.
As a native of Prague he found hirrlself at the heart of debates over
Czech nationalisrn; as a Jew he was confronted not only with the ques-
tion of Zionism but also with the appearance ofBundism in eastern Eu-
rope;31 and as an intellectual he was faced, on the one hand, with prob-
lerrls of national and nationalist engagernent and, on the other, with the
aestheticislTI practiced by his friends in the Prague Circle. 32 These three
positions were often contradictory and yet, at the same time, indisso-
ciable. Kafka found hirrlself at the precise point of intersection of three
overlapping intellectual, literary, and political spaces: Prague, at once a
seat of administration within the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the
cultural capital of Czech nationalism, to be sure, but also a city where
the Germanized Jewish intellectuals who made up the Prague Circle
still affirrrled their identity; Berlin, the literary and intellectual capital of
central Europe as a whole; and, finally, the political and intellectual space
of eastern Europe, a world in which nationalist movements and Jewish
workers parties emerged and Bundist and Zionist ideas clashed-not
The Tragedy qf Translated Men 1 269

forgetting New York, the new city ofJewish immigration, center of pol-
itics, literature, drama, and poetry for the populations that had corne to
America from Russia and Poland.
The Jews of central and eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth
century were in a position cornparable to that of aIl the other peoples of
the region who sought national emancipation, except for this enorrnous
difference: as victirrlS of antisemitisrn, ostracized, stigrnatized, without a
land of their own, and dispersed throughout Europe, rnore than any
other dominated people they faced a huge theoretical and political task
in trying to formulate a set of national (and nationalist) daims and, by
establishing their legitirrlacy, to win acceptance for them. It was unargu-
ably this unique state of extreme subjection that gave birth to the con-
flict that-to oversimplify somewhat-opposed Zionists to Bundists:
the former, heirs to Herder, advocates for the founding of a true nation
identified with a national territory (Palestine); the latter, defenders of
Yiddish language and culture, supporters of diaspora and the formation
of autonomous Jewish comrnunities within existing states.
Kafka's literary-but no doubt also political, which is to say na-
tional-position and aims must be described on the basis of these insep-
arably literary, linguistic, and political aspects of domination. As we have
seen, he became acquainted with the cultural world as weIl as the politi-
cal and linguistic demands of the Yiddishists (typically Bundists, though
sorne were Seimists) through the performances of Yiddish theater pre-
sented in Prague for several months at the end of 191 l and the begin-
ning of 1912 by a troupe frorn Poland. A careful analysis ofhis discovery
of Yiddishkeit indicates that he subsequently sought to take part in the
formation of a Jewish and secular popular culture. One might go further
and, in keeping with the model proposed here, suggest that Kafka was
placed (or placed hirrlself) in the position of a foundational writer, strug-
gling for the full recognition ofhis people and his nation, comrnitted to
the development of a national Jewish literature. On this view he thus
becomes a paradoxical member of Yiddish-Jewish space, tragically dis-
tant yet at the sarrle time actively working on behalf of an emerging
Jewish nation and, by virtue of this, dedicated to the creation of a popu-
lar and nationalliterature and, more generaIly, to the service of Jewish
culture and the Jewish people.
What nIakes Kafka's situation difficult to comprehend is that it was

the exact opposite of that of his contemporaries in Prague. As a first-
generation intellectual in his fà.mily, seeking to join an intellectual world
that on the whole was more bourgeois than he was, Kafka was very dif-
ferent fronl the other members of the Prague Circle, among them his
friend Max Brod: whereas his cornpanions were Zionists, nationalists,
Gerrnanophiles, Hebraists, anti-Yiddishists, he was socialist, Yiddishist,
and anti-Zionist. 33 And as a member of a Jewish community in central
Europe that was largely assimilated and Gerrnanized, he nonetheless
found hirnself in a tragic and contradictory position, for he did not
know Yiddish and therefore could not directly devote hirnself to the
collective enterprise whose grandeur and beauty he described in "Beim
Bau der chinesischen Mauer" (The Great Wall of China, written in 1917
but not published until 1931). This is why he was to adopt a paradoxical
and yet unünprovable solution: to write in German and recount for the
assirnilated Jewish people the tragedy of their assimilation. It thus be-
cornes necessary to reread "Forschungen eines Hundes" (Investigations
of a Dog, written in 1922 and published in 193 1) and Amerika (Arnerica,
written in 1911-1914 and published in 1927) as evidence of Kafka's al-
nlost ethnological deterrnination to give Germanized Jews an account
of their own forgotten history (it needs to be kept in mind that the ac-
tuaI title, due to Kafka hinlself, of the text that Brod published under
the title Amerika was in fact Der Verschollene) rrleaning "The Forgotten
One")34 and to denounce the horror of assünilation--of which he him-
self was a product, and which he saw as a forrrl of self-negation-by
contrast with what he considered the necessary affirrnation of a popular
and secular Jewish national existence.
In other words, Kafka's desire to work on behalf of a Jewish national-
ist and socialist rrlOvement made him-like ail writers who place them-
selves in the service of a national cause-a political artist. But he was
forced to abandon the language of his people-with great sorrow and
regret-in favor of the dominant language. His position was thus exactly
the sarne as that of colonized writers who, with the ernergence of na-
tional independence movernents, discover their unique identity and po-
sition in coming to understand the state of dependence and cultural des-
titution into which assimilation has led them. Just as Joyce decided to
write in English in order to subvert the language frOIn within, Kafka re-
signed hirnself to Gerrnan-but in order to pose in literary terms a
The Tragedy C!fTratlslated Men 1 27I

range of literary, political, and social questions that until then had es-
caped consideration, and tried to express in Gernun the categories pe-
culiar not only to the new Yiddish literature that then was being pro-
duced but to aIl nascent literatures: what might be called collective
literary fonns and genres, which is to say those that have in common the
fact of belonging to a people (tales, legends, myths, chronicles, and so
on). It is precisely in this sense that Kafka's work can be read as a sort of
translation frorn the Yiddish.
The situation of the Gerrnan Jewish writers of Prague, which Kafka
described in his farnous letter to Max Brod of June 192 l, condenses in
an extraordinary way the situation of aIl dominated writers, driven by
the very fact of their cultural and linguistic domination to speak and
write in the language of those who have subdued thern-to the point,
in fact, of making them forget their own language and culture. These
writers, as Kafka explained in a passage reproduced at the beginning of
this chapter, live between three irnpossibilities: of not writing, of writing
in Gerrnan, and of writing otherwise; indeed, between four, counting
the impossibility of writing at aIl. In just the same way Kateb Yacine
could have said that North African writers are torn between as rnany
possibilities (which it is convenient to call1inguistic impossibilities but
which are also political impossibilities): the impossibility of not writing,
the impossibility of writing in French, the impossibility of writing in
Arabic, and the impossibility of writing otherwise. Kafka's friends in the
Prague Circle were forced to write in German, in his view, but they
were so assimilated that they had actually forgotten that they had forgot-
ten their own culture: writing in Gennan was therefore the Inanifest
sign of their subjection. The burden of this is to say that they were in the
position of aIl dorninated or colonized intellectuals who look to lan-
guage for a way out from. the fundamental impasse in which they are
trapped. This is why Kafka was explicitly to ernploy in the same letter--
and in almost the same terms later used by Jean Amrouche in connec-
tion with Algerian writers in the years ünmediately after their country's
independence-the thernes of illegitimacy and the theft of language.
For Jewish intellectuals, use of the German language amounted to "ap-
propriation of someone else's property, sOITlething not earned, but stolen
by means of a relatively casual gesture. Yet it remains someone else's
property, even though there is no evidence of a single solecism"; their
literature was "a literature impossible in aIl respects, a gypsy literature

which had stolen the German child out of its cradle and in great haste
put it through sorne kind of training, for someone has to dance on the
tightrope. (But it wasn't even a Gerrnan child, it was nothing; people
merely said something was dancing.) "35
The tamous passage in Kafka's Diaries where he attributes his incorn-
pIete love for his rnother to a contradiction of language-wonderfülly
revealing of the central place in his thought of this missing mother
tongue, which until now has invariably been analyzed in exclusively
psychological terms-is directly associated with his thinking about the
Yiddish language. It appears in the midst of notes devoted to Isak Lowy
and his mernories of the actor:
Yesterday it occurred to me that l did not always love my mother as

she deserved and as l could [have], only because the German language
prevented it. The Jewish mother is no "Mutter," to cail her "Mutter"
makes her a little comic (not to herself, because we are in Germany);
we give a Jewish woman the name of a German mother, but forget the
contradiction that sinks into the emotions so much the more heavily.
"Mutter" is peculiarly German for the Jew, it unconsciously contains
. . . Christian splendor [as weil as] Christian coldness; the Jewish
woman who is cailed "Mutter" therefore becomes not only comic but
strange. 36
German, as a foreign language and at the same time mother tongue (a

dilemma that Rilke, who experienced it as weIl, was to find other ways
of escaping), was a borrowed language, appropriated through assimila-
tion. To Kafka's rnind-echoing exactly the terrrlS of the political debate
that was then unfolding in Jewish circles throughout Europe-it had
been shamefully stolen at the cost of forgetting oneself and betraying
Jewish culture.
This reading, which 1 shall argue for in greater detail in a forthcoming
work, and which accommodates rather than excludes a great many prior
interpretations (psychological, philosophical, religious, and metaphysical,
among others), may seem somewhat shocking and disillusioning, even
blasphemous, for readers accustomed to the standard picture of Kafka as
a "pure" artist. It irnposed itself upon me, little by little and almost in
spite of rrly own wishes, as a consequence of historical research that led
me to put Kafka back into the national (and therefore international)
world in which he lived.

CREATORS OF LANGUAGES
The appearance of a national language distinct from the dominant lan-
guage is primarily a consequence of political decisions, and has the con-
sequence in turn that sorne authors will corne to write in it. Even if this
option represents an extrerne position in the range oflinguistic possibili-
ties, which is to say arnong the ITlain paths of political and literary differ-
entiation, it is also one of the rnost difficult and most perilous. Ernerging
literary spaces today, notably in Africa, are repeating the experience of
nineteenth-century Europe, where the new languages that achieved of-
ficial status were based on a regional dialect. In Europe, as Eric Hobs-
bawrn observed, "literary Bulgarian is based on the West Bulgarian id-
iom, literary Ukrainian on its southeastern dialects, literary Hungarian
elnerges in the sixteenth century by combining various dialects," and so
on. 37 N orwegian brought together, in an almost experimental way, as we
have seen, two national languages: the one, Bokmal ("book language"),
very_ strongly Danicized after four hundred years of foreign rule, bore
the historical ITlarks of colonization; the other, Landsmal (" country lan-
guage"), later called Nynorsk ("new Norwegian"), was the work of intel-
lectuals in the rnid-nineteenth century who advocated, as part of the
movement for national independence, the creation of a "truly" Norwe-
gian language. The absence of literariness in these and other languages
that have little value in the literary rnarketplace (including languages
such as Catalan, Czech, and Polish that dispose of an ancient stock oflit-
erary capital) leads to the almost automatic marginalization of the writ-
ers who defend thern, with the result that they have immense difficulty
achieving recognition in literary centers. The nlore peripheral their lan-
guage and the more devoid it is of resources, the greater the pressure
upon them to become national writers. In effect, writers who take this
path suffer the consequences of a dual dependence, which itself is the
product of the twofold invisibility and nonexistence of their language,
both in the internationallinguistic and political marketplace and in the
literary rnarketplace.
In literary worlds in which the national language is initiaily endowed
with only an oral tradition, or, as in the case of Gaelic, has a long-inter-
rupted written tradition, literary capital-that is, the traditional forms
associated with written tradition-is alrnost nonexistent. This is why ail
attempts at "standardization"-at establishing orthographic and syntac-
tic norms, which precede the elaboration of a literary tradition in the

strict sense-place inte11ectuals and writers in the exclusive service of
the new language, which is to say the new nation. 38 In Ireland at the be-
ginning of the century, poets and inte11ectuals who chose to write in
Gaelic devoted themselves rrlOre to the codification of their language
than to the creation of a distinctive literature, which in any case was
much less valued than the work of their contemporaries who wrote in
English. Writers engaged in a struggle on behalf of their nation rnust
therefore build up literary resources of their own from nothing: they
must construct a literary tradition out of whole cloth, a tradition with its
own thernes and genres that will achieve respectability for a language
that, being unknown and unvalued in the literary marketplace, will have
to be imrnediately translated in order to find internationallegitimacy.
The Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong' 0, who, as we have noted,
abandoned the literary use ofEnglish in favor ofhis mother tongue, Ki-
kuyu, is a lirniting case-and a fascinating one for what it reveals about
literary enterprises of this type. Before 1970 there existed very few texts
in this language, apart from cheap novels sold in the market. 39 In 1980
Ngugi published his first book in Kikuyu, Caitaani mutharaba-ini, and
since then the literary corpus in this language seems almost to have
grown through his own productions alone. 40 His desire to promote the
literary status ofhis native language is clearly consistent with the logic of
initial accumulation:
Language is both a product of that succession of the separate genera-
tions, as well as being a bank for the way oflife reflecting those modi-
fications of collective experience in the production and reproduction
of their life. Literature, thinking in images, utilizes language and draws
upon the collective experience embodied in the language . . .We
Kenyans can no longer avoid the question: whose language and his-
tory will our literature draw upon ... ? If a Kenyan writer wants to
speak to the peasants and workers of any one Kenyan community,
then he should write in the language they speak and understand . . .
In making their choices, Kenyan writers should remember that the
struggle of our languages against domination by those of Europe is
part of a wider historical struggle of the Kenyan national culture
against imperialist domination. 41
Salman Rushdie, reca11ing his participation with Ngugi in a 1983 co11o-

quiurrl in Sweden devoted to the topic "ComrrlOnwealth Literature,"
noted the usual characterizations of the Kenyan author (" cornrrlÎtted

Marxist," "an overtly political writer") and remernbered that he "ex-
pressed his rejection of the English language by reading his own work in
Swahili, with a Swedish version read by his translator, leaving the rest of
us completely bernused."42
The contradictions in which these authors are caught up are rein-
forced by the literary forrns that they adopt. The less literary credit there
is available to thern, the more writers are dependent on the national and
political order, the rnore they are obliged to borrow literary forms hav-
ing very little value along the Greenwich meridian. The absence of a lit-
erary tradition of their own, combined with their weakness in relation
to the political authorities, has the effect of encouraging the reproduc-
tion of the most traditional models. Ngugi hin1self spoke of the practical
problems that he encountered in crafting literary fictions in Kikuyu.
Having access to no model other than the Bible, he met with great dif-
ficulties in the construction of narrative and in the "temporal marking
of quoted speech."43
These various obstacles explain why many dominated literary spaces,
despite the establishment of a national language of their own, rernain
bilingual for literary purposes. Just as in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries there was a Latin/French bilingualism44 among men and
women ofletters, instituted and reproduced by the educational system as
a consequence of the undisputed dominance of Latin, so it is by virtue
of their literary bilingualism (or digraphy in Ricard's sense) that the de-
pendence of rnany literary spaces can be recognized. Alternatively, one
might say that it is in the progressive disappearance of bilingualism (or
digraphy)-an unrnistakable sign of the overcoming of literary subjec-
tion-that the degree of linguistic and literary emancipation and prog-
ress in appropriating new national literary wealth can be recognized.
Thus it was the accumulation of literary credit attaching to the French
language during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that permitted
the triumph of French described in the first part of this book, its sym-
bolic increase in value, and the graduaI retreat from Latin (or, at least, its
relegation to a secondary place). Objective rneasures of the current po-
litical and literary position of Arabie by comparison with French in Al-
geria, of Kikuyu by cornparison with English in Kenya, of Gaelic by
comparison with English in Ireland, of Catalan (or Galician) by cornpar-
ison with Castilian in Spain-taking into account the official status of
the language, the number of people who speak it, its place in the educa-

tional systern, the number ofbooks published in it, the nurnber ofwrit-
ers who have chosen to write in it, and so on-make it possible to esti-
mate and analyze the extent of linguistic and literary domination in
each of these countries.
In what rnight be called median literary spaces-ones that are neither

central nor located on the remote periphery, su ch as those of srnall Eu-
ropean countries-the situation is structurally very similar, allowing for
differences of degree, to that of very in1poverished zones. As in the case
of the poorest literatures, the effects of linguistic and literary inequality
are still so powerful that it can actually prevent (or at least n1ake very dif-
ficult) the recognition and consecration of writers working in smalllan-
guages. Thus Henrik Stangerup speaks of his rnother tongue, Danish, as
a "miniature language." The great Danish poet Adam OehlenschHiger
(1779-1850) stands for hirn as the symbol of this linguistic marginality, as
a "Danish poet-Napoleon, capable of a titanic output, like a Hugo or a
Balzac, worthy of being recruited as a member of their conspiracy-if
only he had written in a major language-against the crass stupidity that
recognizes no [national] frontiers."45 Notwithstanding the ecumenical
ideology that presides over literary celebrations, writers in small lan-
guages are apt to find themselves marginalized. Thus the great Brazilian
critic Antonio Candido has noted that at the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury the stylistic and literary originality of Machado de Assis might have
allowed him, had circumstances been different, to exercise an interna-
tional influence:
Of the Western languages, ours [Portuguese] is the least known, and if

the eountries where it is spoken matter little today, in 1900 they mat-
tered even less in the politieal game. For this reason, two novelists who
wrote in our language and who are the equals of the best then writing
remain marginal: Eça de Queir6s, weil suited to the spirit of natural-
ism; and Machado de Assis ... a writer of international stature [who]
remained almost totaily unknown outside Brazil ... His almost hyper-
trophie national glory was the eounterpart of a diseouraging interna-
tional obseurity.46
This great critic, committed to bringing about a reevaluation of his

country's literature, was hirnself a victim of the structural ostracisrn he
described: as Howard Becker has observed, Candido "stayed in Brazil,
The Tragedy cifTi'al1S1ated Men 1 277

wrote in its language, and devoted rnuch ofhis effort to its literature, un-
farniliar (with a few exceptions) to non-Portuguese-speaking readers.
And so his work is alrnost unknown elsewhere."47 In exactly the same
sense E. M. Cioran reflected upon the predicarnent of his old friend
Petre Tutea (1901-1991), who he felt would surely have enjoyed inter-
national farne had he not lived in Bucharest and written in Rornanian:
"What an extraordinary rnan! With his rnatchless eloquence, if he had
lived in Paris he would have a worldwide reputation today."48
Instances ofbilingualism are also encountered in these nledian spaces.
Today in Catalonia, for example, which asserts its distinctive cultural
identity as a "nation," Catalan and Castilian coexist and cOlnpete with
each other. Success in winning recognition for the region's linguistic
and cultural autonomy has ITlade it possible to establish independent
networks for the production, nlarketing, and distribution of its litera-
ture. 49 ln Barcelona there are now Catalan publishers who issue works
for _a "national" public that has beconle more and more nUlnerous
thanks to what might be cailed the Catalanization of the educational
system. For a quarter-century or rnore writers such as Sergi Pamies, Pere
Gimferrer, Jesus Moncada, and Quim Monza have been able to write
and publish in the Catalan language and, what is Inore, they can now
hope to be translated directly into the great literary languages without
having to pass through the interrnediate stage of Castilian. The appear-
ance of a corps of specialized translators has opened literary production
to an international audience and graduaily given the Catalan language
existence not orùy in international literary space but in international
political space as weil. But even if Catalan has become an increasingly le-
gitimate option, Castilian has rernained in sorne ways a more attractive
alternative. As 1 have already had occasion to emphasize, Catalan novel-
ists working in Castilian, whose works by definition are available to a
broader audience, and who spread a euphemistic version of Catalonian
cultural nationalisnl aimed at the general public-in the farm of detec-
tive novels by authors such as Manuel Vazquez Montalban, or of realistic
novels evoking the history of Barcelona by Eduardo Mendoza, Juan
Marsé, and others-have achieved rnuch greater recognition in the great
literary centers. In these worlds, in other words, bilingualism has a ten-
dency to disappear in the work of individual authors: though it no
longer serves to express wrenching personal dilenlmas, it persists in the
form of a struggle for linguistic legitirnacy within the national literary
space itself.

National and international poles tend to be differentiated in rnedian
spaces, however, and the position of what 1 have called national authors
changes rneaning. Whereas in the newest spaces these authors struggle
politically and literarily for autonorny-their very politicization, as 1
have argued, constituting in itself a paradoxical but real form of inde-
pendence-in literatures that have already achieved a certain degree of
autonorny national writers turn their back on the wider world and de-
vote themselves to literary conservatism, to closing off aesthetic and po-
litical borders. At the same time there appear writers who, refusing total
subrnission to national norms and "duties," look beyond their borders
and take inspiration from the aesthetic innovations consecrated along
the Greenwich rneridian. By the same token, oversimplifying slightly,
one nuy describe these rnedian worlds as structured on the basis of an
opposition between national writers who have become nationalists and
international writers who have become modernists.
Owing to their decentered position in world literary space, and the
fact that they work in a language poorly endowed in literary capital, the
national-conservatives go untranslated; having no existence, visibility, or
recognition outside their nationalliterary space, they do not exist liter-
arily. The national writer has a national career and a national market: he
reproduces in the language of his nation rnodels that are not only the
most conventional but also the most consistent with commercial-
which is to say national, universally outmoded--criteria. Just as his own
work is not exported, neither does he import anything: he is unaware of
the aesthetic innovations and debates taking place beyond the borders of
his country; unaware of the revolutions that are leaving their mark on
the world of letters. Being untranslated, his work never reaches this
world--the very idea of literature me ans nothing to him. The portrait
that Juan Benet draws of the Spanish writer Pio Baroja (r872-r956)
gives a succinct definition of the national writer:
Over the course of a life of more than eighty years and a literary career
of almost sixty, having hardly altered the premises from which he had
begun ... his work ended at the same point from which it had started
... between his youth and his maturity, he saw modernism, Symbol-
ism, Dadaism, Surrealism pass by without his pen knowing the slight-
est quiver; he saw Proust, Gide,joyce, Mann, Kafka, to say nothing of
Breton, Céline, Forster, ail the Americans of the interwar period, the
lost generation, the literature of the revolution, without raising his
The Tragedy qfTranslated MeIl 1 279

head at their passing ... His mind was already set when the ideas of
Marx and Freud began to circulate, ideas for which he had only dis-
dain. Having immunized himself [against events], he was profoundly
unaffected by the war of 1914, the Bolshevik revolution, the chaos of
the postwar years or the appearance of dictatorships and fascisms. In a
sense he had placed himself outside time. 50
By "untranslated writers" 1 do not me an that no author of this type

has Inanaged ever to have his work published in another language. 1
me an that, being by definition "behind" in relation to the literary pres-
ent, they never really manage to achieve international recognition. In a
very curious yet convincing way, one can point to similarities in respect
both of style (always realistic) and of content (always national) between
the great saga of the Korean writer Pak Kyong-Ni, the official national
candidate for the Nobel Prize; the work of Dobrica éosié, the former
president of Serbia and the author of irnrnensely popular national novels
co_nceived on the Toistoyan model; that of Dragan Jeremié, dissected by
Danilo Kis in The Anatomy Lesson) where it is dismissed as "pretty"; and
that of Miguel Delibes in Spain-to name only four examples. The
national writer manages to prosper in every part of the world only
through the reproduction (and the consolidation in rnany forms, partic-
ularly comrnercial ones) of poles that are not merely national but na-
tionalist, conservative, traditional-in a word, to recall KiS's term, igno-
rant. Ali these untranslated writers stand opposed to the centripetal
forces of world literary space and act as a powerful brake upon the pro-
cess of unification. By partitioning and dividing world literature, their
work promotes political and national dependence.
In these sarne spaces, by contrast, there also appear authors who reject
the closing in of the nation upon itself and embrace international crite-
ria of innovation and modernity. They become, as we have seen, import-
ers of central innovations (via "in-translation) whose own work is ex-
ported (via "ex-translation"). Their own work, nourished by the great
revolutionaries and innovators who have left a mark in the literary cap-
itals, coincides with the categories of those responsible for consecration
in the centers. Like Danilo Kis, Arno Schmidt, Jorge Luis Borges, and
others, they are also translated and recognized in Paris, despite their be-
longing to destitute literary spaces (in which they remain exceptional
figures) very far from the Greenwich meridian.

It is in these worlds that one encounters authors who are naturalized, as
it were, in another language; who, in order to overcome the marginality
and ren10teness to which their national (and native) language mechani-
caily condemns them, have converted to one of the great literary idi-
OIns. Thus, at one point or another during their careers, Cioran,
Kundera, Panait Istrati, Beckett, Nabokov, Conrad, and Strindberg ail
adopted one of the great world literary languages-whether in a provi-
sional or a definitive way, whether alternating between two languages or
in systernatic and symrnetrical translation-without having been corn-
peiled to do so for any political or economic reason. These comings and
goings between two languages, two cultures, two worlds are the result of
a bilingualism (or digraphy) that is in no way the consequence of colo-
nial or political domination. It can be explained only by the weight of
the unequal structure of the literary world, for only the invisible power
of the belief that ennobles certain languages and of the discredit that
devalues others can force sorne authors-without any apparent coer-
cion-to exchange their native language for another.
We have seen that Cioran, having published several books in Roma-
nian in Bucharest, wished to rediscover the language ofliterature par ex-
ceilence-which is to say, according to the oldest conceptions ofbalance
of power in the literary world, the language of the "century of Louis
XIV" -the essence of classicism-and in this way transmute himself
into a French writer. Similarly, but according to a quite different political
and aesthetic logic, the poetry of Paul Celan (1920-1970)---composed
in and at the same time in opposition to German, whose conventions it
shattered-has been seen by sorne interpreters as having actuaily been
written in order to be translated into French, ultirnately the syrnbol of
its deliverance from the language of the Holocaust. On this view, one is
dealing with a kind of translation internaI to the process of writing it-
self. Celan (born,like Cioran, in Romania) closely coilaborated on the
French version ofhis poems withJean Daive and André du Bouchet, an
exan1ple of assisted translation that appeared a year after his death under
the title Strette. This text must be considered as whoily due to Celan,
without in any way preventing other translations frorn being attempted.
Milan Kundera (b. 1929), a Czech writer exiled in France since 1975,
began writing in French after rus arrivaI there. Taking matters a step fur-
ther, however, having personaily gone over and corrected the French
translations of ail his earlier books in Czech, he has insisted since 1985

that the French version ofhis work is the only authorized one. By an in-
version of the ordinary process of translation (which proves yet again
that translation involves not merely a change oflanguage but a change in
the very "nature" of a work), the French text of his writings therefore
becarne the original version. "Since then," Kundera writes, "1 have con-
sidered the French text to be nrine, and 1 ailow my novels be translated
frorn Czech as weil as from French. 1 even have a slight preference for
the latter option."51
LlTERARY USES OF THE ORAL LANGUAGE

ln linguisticaily dependent regions, including North America and Latin
America, which 1 have earlier described as exceptions within the set of
territories under colonial donrination,52 where as a result of cultural and
political traditions writers have available to them only one great literary
language, the same distinctive strategies are found in other forms.
In the absence of an alternative language, writers are forced to devise
a new idiom within their own language; subverting established literary
usages and the rules of grammatical and literary correctness, they affirrn
the specificity of a popular language. Historically, the category and no-
tion of a popular language--that is, a me ans of expression intrinsicaily
linked to the nation and the people, which it defines and whose exis-
tence it justifies-emerged at the juncture of the two main conceptions
of the people, as nation and as social class. It therefore became necessary
to reinstate a paradoxical sort ofbilingualism by making it possible to be
different, linguisticaily and literarily, within a given language. In this way
a new idiom was created, through the littérarisation of oral practices.
Here, in linguistic farrn, one encounters the mechanisms underlying the
literary transmutation of traditional folk narratives.
Though apparently less radical than adopting a new language, this so-
lution is actuaily, in the absence of anything better, a way of placing the
writer at the greatest possible distance from the political pole of a given
literary space.While remaining within the central language it becomes
possible, by means of nrinute deviations, to break with it no less explic-
itly than if one had adopted another tongue. Ramuz, in embracing the
tactic of "exaggerating one's own differences," chose precisely this solu-·
tion on returning to his native Vaud. Many other writers have likewise
sought, through the subversion of conventions that are both social and
linguistic, to create nlOre or less marked differences in usage and pro-

nunciation, relying on idiomatic expressions and deliberately incorrect
usage, with a view to founding a new and inalienable popular identity.
This approach was rnagnificently inaugurated by the Irish playwright
John Millington Synge (1871-1909), who brought the language of his
nation's peasants, Anglo-Irish-a language that was at once real and
littérarisé-to the stage. Synge's solution was faithful to the popular con-
ception of the national language while at the same time representing a
break with the canons of English linguistic propriety. The introduction
of an oral language in literature alters the terrns of literary debate and
underrnines the tenets ofliterary realisrn everywhere: in both Egypt and
Brazil during the 1920S and 1930s,53 in Quebec during the 196os, in
Scotland during the 1980s, and in the West Indies today, the spoken lan-
guage rnade it possible, in ditlerent fornls and for ditlerent purposes, to
proclaim an emancipation that was literary or political, or sometimes
both.
The invention of a new idiom also nude it possible to reject an im-
possible choice. Just as Synge, in making peasants speak in a "mixed"
language in lreland at the beginning of the twentieth century, refused to
choose between English and Irish, so Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chaln-
oiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, in their rnanifesto of "Creoleness" pub-
lished in Paris in 1989, expressed an unwillingness to choose between
the two terms of a crippling alternative-"Europeanness and African-
ness"-that had long shackled writers on the periphery.54
The ChalTlpioning ofjoual in Quebec in the 1960s was as rnuch a re-
jection of the ascendancy of the English language ("whitespeak") as of
the norms of proper French. In ernbracing a despised dialect (the word
joual) a phonetic transcription of the popular Québécois pronunciation
of cheval) was until recently a pejorative shorthand for the gap between
the local dialect and academic French) as the linguistic symbol of the
political and literary independence they demanded, Michel Tremblay
and other authors affirnled their autonorny in the fàce of the two domi-
nant languages, the English of Ottawa and the French of Paris, champi-
oning French against English while at the same tirne calling for the use
of a specific language freed frorn French norms-one that was oral,
popular, and full of slang. Thus a working-class Montreal dialect with
rural roots that incorporated rnany Anglicisrns and Arnericanisms came
to be promoted as a North Arnerican "Creole." Already by the lTud-
1960s it had achieved the status (albeit provisional) of a literary language,
The Tragedy qf Translated Men 1 28 3

making it possible politicaily to establish French as the language of the
(~uébécois in their struggle against the hegernony of English while si-
multaneously resisting the domination of the French of France. The re-
view Parti Pris, founded in I963, described the situation in Quebec as
one of colonial oppression and rapidly rnade itself the mouthpiece for
literary and political protest in the province. The foilowing year the re-
view's publishing arm, Éditions Parti Pris, brought out Le Cabochon (The
Cabochon, 1964), by André Maj or, and, still rnore importantly, Le Cassé
(Broke City, 1964), by Jacques Renaud-works that, in provoking the
quarrel over joual, utterly recast the terms ofliterary debate. By distanc-
ing then1selves from acadenuc norms, then, Québécois authors created a
me ans of expression (soon to be chailenged) that paradoxicaily permit-
ted them to reappropriate French for themselves.
Depending on a literary space's degree of emancipation, which is to
say the degree to which it has been denationalized, a rnore or less auton-
omous-that is, literary-use is made of the popular language. It is
nonetheless the case that writers who make exclusive (or alnlOst ex-
clusive) use of a great literary language have a distinct advantage in as-
sembling a patrimony. Unlike those who create new languages devoid of
literary credit, writers who inherit a dominant language, even in sub-
verting it and in changing its codes and uses, accomplish a sort of diver-
sion of capital and benefit from ail its literary resources, for this is a lan-
guage capable of conveying literary value and credit from the start, of
supporting national mythologies and pantheons, and of providing an an-
chor for literary belief. Though they run a risk in pushing ahead, the
aesthetic of writers who adopt a great literary language with the inten~
tion of transforming it is fron1 the outset more innovative, on account of
the intrinsic literary capital of this language, th an that of writers who
promote a new language having no capital at ail. This is why dominated
authors who are speakers (and writers) of central languages belong at
once to relatively weil-endowed literary spaces.
ANDRADE: THE ANTI-CAMOES

The career of Mario de Andrade (1893-1945), commonly regarded as
the high priest of Brazilian lllodernism, needs to be placed within the
same perspective of the literary creation of a popular and national lan-
guage. His most farnous work, Macuna{ma (1928), was conceived as the
cornerstone of a national literature, denlanding and at the same time

creating a wrÏtten Brazilian language distinct frorn "the language of
Camoes," the symbol of proper Portuguese usage. With the same deter-
rnination showed by Joyce in rejecting the literary and gramrnatical con-
ventions of English, he declared: "We are confronted with the current,
national, rnoral, and hurnan problern of Brazilianizing Brazil."55 This af-
firrnation of a culture peculiar to Brazil, transrnitted and created through
a language that is itselfBrazilian, therefore proceeded from a resolve not
only to put an end to linguistic dependence upon Portugal but also,
more broadly, to literary (and cultural) dependence with regard to Eu-
rope as a whole: "Patience is a virtue, brothers," cries the Amazonian
emperor Macunairna. "No! 1 won't go to Europe ... l'ln an Alnerican,
and my place is here in Arnerica. Without a doubt, European civilization
would play havoc with our unspoiled nature."56 Andrade was certainly
not the first Brazilian writer,57 nor was rnodernism the first Brazilian lit-
erary rnoven1ent: a long literary history had gone before. But, as in the
case of Spanish-speaking America, this history had until then to a large
degree consisted of works that reproduced models imported frorn Eu-
rope with various srnall differences that were not always insisted upon.
Modernisrn, of which Andrade was one of the chief theoreticians and
spokesrnen, was the first movement that explicitly den1anded a national
literary emancipation. Indeed, one rnight say that Andrade was in ex-
actly the same position as du Bellay when he called for an end to be put
to the dependence of French upon Latin. 58 Andrade was the founding
poet of Brazilian literary space by virtue of the fact that, in proclairning
and creating a national "difference," he was the first (along with the
other members of the modernist generation) to bring this space into the
great international game, into the world of literature on a global scale.
His friend Oswald de Andrade, author of two irnportant literary calls-
to-arrns-Manifèsto antrop6fago (Cannibalistic Manifesto, 1928), with its
famous line "Tupi or not tupi, that is the question," and Manifesto da
poesia Pau-Brasil (Manifesto ofBrazilwood Poetry, 1924), which took its
tide from the red hardwood that was colonial Brazil's leading export-
was more explicit in this connection. Oswald de Andrade's sylvan lneta-
phor was rneant to affirm his deterrnination to create a poetry that
could at last be exported: "A single struggle," he wrote, "the struggle for
the way forward. Let us distinguish: Irnported Poetry. And Brazilwood
Poetry, for exportation."59
The modernist project was at once political and literary. During the

farnous Modern ArtWeek held in Sào Paulo in 1922-conllilernorating
the centenary of Brazil's independence-a group of poets, musicians,
and painters solemnly tore apart a copy of Camoes's Os Lusfadas (The
Lusiads, 1572), thus sYlnbolicaily declaring war on Portugal. But they
wished also to put an end to the undoubted literary domination of Paris,
where the rnajority ofBrazilian inteilectuals went to get their start. The
French model was so irnposing that the rnodernists resolved, as Mârio de
Andrade put it, to cut "the umbilical cord that ties us to France. Instead
of going to Paris and foolishly strutting about, writers ought to pack
their bags and start digging around their own country. Ouro Preto and
Manaus rather than Montmartre and Florence!"60 The strength of the
urge to reject Paris was cornmensurate with the extraordinary (and al-
most fetishistic) passion and fascination felt by Brazilians for the capital
of literature. 61 Here we encounter the predicarnent of founding writers
mentioned earlier in connection with their struggle for both political
and literary autonomy: the foundation of a nationalliterary space as an
affirmation of differences requires a break with ail forms of annexation,
whether they are strictly political-as in the case of dependence upon
Portugal-or specificaily literary-as in the case of submission to Paris:
"We are in the process of ending the domination of the French spirit,"
Andrade wrote to the Brazilian poet Alberto de Oliveira (1857-1937).
"We are in the process of ending the graITlmatical domination of Por-
tu gal." 62
Macunafma) first published in 1928, was to become one of the great
national literary classics. In this joyous, impertinent, and provocative
work one finds ail the characteristic features of foundational literary
works. Andrade proposed to Brazilianize the Portuguese language; that
is, to appropriate it through the usages of the Portuguese spoken in
Brazil, by integrating in the national patrimony of arts and letters the
sounds and expressions of the oral language, which diverged frorn Por-
tuguese norrns. "1 was fleeing the Portuguese system," he later explained
to another countryn1an, the poet Manuel Bandeira (1885-1968). "1
wanted to write in Brazilian without failing into provincialism. 1 wanted
to systematize the everyday nlÏstakes rnade in conversation, the idiom-
atic expressions of Brazilian, its GailicisITlS, its Italianisms, its slang, its
regionalisms, archaisrns, pleonasms."63 He insisted above ail that a haIt
be put to what he ironicaily cailed the "bilingualisnl" of his country-
for in tact it had two languages, "spoken Brazilian and written Portu-

guese."64 Here one notices another trait that is also found during the ini-
tial accumulation of French literary capital in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries: the desire for ernancipation frorn an overly rigid set of
written norrns that prevented the enrichrnent and transformation oflit-
erary expression through recourse to new forrns of the spoken tongue.
Malherbe's fanlous appeal to the "hay-pitchers at the Port-au-Foin"-a
plea for an oral, free, and popular use of the language-was conceived as
a weapon for cornbating the artificiality and especially the immobility
(and therefore the repetitive character) of written models, which, be-
cause they are always carefully and endlessly reproduced, can neither re-
new the language nor develop or increase its resources. ln Macuna{ma,
Portuguese-a written and therefore sclerotic, dying language-is di-
rectly compared to Latin. Referring to the inhabitants of Sào Paulo,
Andrade remarked with wonder that
the richness of their intellectual self-expression is so prodigious that

they speak in one language and write in another ... In their conversa-
tions the Paulistas use a barbarous and multifarious dialect, uncouth
and polluted with colloquialisrns, but which does not lack gusto and
forcefulness in figures of speech and coital idioms ... But although
such vulgar and ignoble language is used in conversation, as soon as
the natives of these parts pick up a pen, they divest themselves of such
crudities and emerge every whit as Homo latinus (Linnaeus), expressing
themselves in another language, closer to that of Virgil ... a mellow
tongue which, full as it is of everlasting grace, could be called-the
language of that immortal bard-Camoes!65
It is noteworthy that Andrade's strategy is precisely the same as that of

Beckett, who in "Dante ... Bruno. Vico ... Joyce" argued that English
was an old, if not actually dead, language, no less than Latin was in Eu--
rope in Dante's time. 66
Similarly, and in accordance with a logic similar to Joyce's in Ulysses,
Andrade's proclamation of a written nationalliterature in a national lan-
guage went hand in hand with a desire to shatter the taboos-cultural,
grarnrnatical, sexual, lexical, and literary-of colonial rnoralisnl and so-
cial propriety; in short, to refuse to show respect for the dominant hier-
archy of literary values. Tropical civilization, or "tropicalisrn," of which
Andrade clainled to be a representative, required the affirrnation of a
"barbarisrn" that stood the official cultural order on its head. Thus his
The Tragedy afTranslated Men 1 287

I928 traveljournal opens with this observation about the Carioca-the
inhabitant of Rio de Janiero-as opposed to the Paulista-the rnore Eu-
ropean native of Sao Paulo: "So aIl this rnarvelous exuberance of the
Carioca wornan reflects a new country of Arnerica, a civilization that is
called barbarous because it contrasts with European civilization. But
what aIl these people deprived of our country calI barbarous is only a re-
education. Exhilarating syrnptorn of Brazil."67 MacunaÎma is therefore a
deliberately provocative text, slangy, comical, antiliterary, assuming aIl
the apparent contradictions of the struggle against European seriousness
in its various fonns.
But for Andrade it was not orùy a question of nationalizing the lan-
guage. He wanted also, like aIl founders of nationalliteratures, to gather
existing resources in order to transrnute them into cultural and literary
capital. The only discipline to which he could look for guidance in 10-
cating, recording, assernbling, and irnparting literary value to the tales,
leg~nds, rites, and popular ITlyths of his country was ethnology. In other
words, although he sought to eITlancipate his country politically and
linguistically from Portugal, and culturally and literarily frorn Europe,
Andrade found himself com.pelled to turn to the work of European
scholars, who had been the first to describe the raw materials out of
which a distinctive culture could be created. We know that the idea for
his novel caIne to him after reading the second volume of the German
ethnologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg's Vom Roroima zum Orinoco (From
Roroima to the Orinoco, 5 vols., I9I7-I928), a collection of Indian leg-
ends and mythical narratives in which the character of Macunaima ap~
pears. 68 On the basis of ethnological, linguistic, and geographical data, of
scholarly analysis and interpretation, and through his own collection of
nuterials scattered throughout the country that were destined to furnish
the basis for a properly Brazilian culture, Andrade attempted to summa-
rize aIl the knowledge and learning that existed about his native land.
This project was anirnated by an explicit desire to culturally unify the
Brazilian nation: Andrade sought to bring together within a single text
("one Brazil and one hero," as he described the subject matter of his
book in I935) aIl the regions of the country, its cultural and geograph-
ical diversity, and its distinguishing features. 69 "One of my purposes," he
remarked, "was-in the manner of legends-not to respect geography
and [the] geographical [distribution of] flora and fauna. 1 thus dere-
gionalized creation as far as possible and at the same time succeeded in

imagining Brazil literarily as a homogeneous entity-as a national and
geographic ethnie concept."70 To avoid realism (and therefore regional-
ist divisions) he situated the legends of the south in the north, mixed
expressions of gauchos with turns of phrase found in the northeast, and
relocated animaIs and plants. But Andrade also developed a very sophis-
ticated and double-edged position: while gathering and explicitly enno-
bling the elernents of a cultural patrirnony that until then had been rno-
nopolized by ethnology, at the same time he adopted an ironie and
parodistic tone that, in a literary mode, denied and undermined the
foundations of his enterprise as a whole.
Apart from. the exposition of myths and legends, Andrade's narrative
(subtitled a "rhapsody") was also the occasion for an inventory of his
country's indigenous vocabulary.71 By compiling lists-frequently char-
acterized as Rabelaisian and often cornic in their effect-Andrade as-
sembled a repertoire of terrns that acquired a specifically Brazilian char-
acter in the process. Owing to the fact that they were employed in a
literary context for the first time, in Andrade's hands they came to have a
dual existence: national (since now they had entered into the autho-
rized, or at least recognized, lexicon) and literary (indeed poetic): "They
inquired of all the creatures there: tortoises, marmosets, little arrnadillos,
river turtles, lizards, poisonous wasps, swallows, srnall owls of ill omen,
woodpeckers, rnotmots ... from the lizard that plays hide and seek with
the rat; from fish with scales and fish without; and frorn the sandpipers
that skitter along the sandy beaches-all these living things they asked;
not one had se en anything or knew anything."72 Here again one finds
evidence of a virtually universal strategy at work. Long ago du Bellay
had exhorted "poëtes françoys" to enrich the vocabulary of French
poetry by employing the technical terms used in various professional
trades-modern words that could not exist or even have an equivalent
in Latin, thus constituting a source of truly French originality: "Again l
would urge thee to haunt at times, not only the learned but also all kinds
of workrnen and mechanics, as mariners, founders, painters, engravers,
and others, to know their inventions, the names of their rnaterials, their
tools and the terms used in their arts and crafts, to draw there from those
fine cOlnparisons and lively descriptions of all things."73
The best proof that Macunaima is indeed a national text, and one of
national ambition, is that whereas it was to enjoy irmnense success
throughout Brazil, translation proposaIs aroused little interest abroad.

Today it is a Brazilian classic that figures in examination syllabuses and
has been the object of dozens of critical studies, cOlnmentaries, interpre-
tations, and annotated editions as weIl as cinema tic and theatrical adap-
tations; it has even becorne the rnarching therne of a salnba school. 74
But it had great difficulty going beyond the boundaries of Brazil, and
only very belatedly achieved international recognition. The sarrle year
that the book was published in Sao Paulo, Valery Larbaud asked Jean
Duriaud, one of the principal translators ofBrazilian literature in France,
to inquire into the possibility of translating it. "No, 1 know nothing
about Mario de Andrade," Duriaud replied to Larbaud in October 1928.
"On your advice 1 wrote to him, but-an illustration of what 1 was say-
ing earlier-he hasn't bothered to reply."75 Andrade, refusing to subnlÎt
hirnself to the judgrrlent of the center, and fully absorbed in his national
task, was quite uninterested-like allliterary founders concerned to re-
sist systematic central annexations of national work-in possible transla-
tions ofhis textJ6 But this characteristic lack of concern with translation
is not the only point of interest: the ignorance of Macunaîma in Euro-
pean centers was, conversely, the proof of their critical ethnocentrism.
An ltalian translation of the book appeared orùy in 1970, followed by a
Spanish translation in 1977. The first French translation (by Jacques
Thiériot) did not come out until 1979-more than fifty years after its
publication in Brazil, having been rejected by several publishing houses
(despite the favorable opinions of Roger Caillois and Raylnond
Queneau). And instead of conferring belated but well-deserved recog-
nition, the French translation rested finally on a gigantic rnisunder-
standing: published in a series devoted to Hispanophone writers of
the "boom," Andrade's book was said to display affinities with their
"baroque" aesthetic that plainly it did not.
The subsequent course of Andrade's career, which in a sense only
served to amplify his initial purpose, unarnbiguously showed the true
nature of what was at bottom a nationalliterary and cultural enterprise.
Mter the book's original publication in 1928, Andrade devoted hirnself
to collecting examples of music and folklore that might be used to
found and enrich a national Brazilian culture. A trained rnusicologist, he
undertook research into popular songs and dances for a dictionary of
Brazilian music, regularly published essays on ethnorrlUsicology, orga-
nized the first conference on the language of Brazilian song, and took
part in the creation of a governmental departlnent for national historical

and artlstlc heritage. Additionally, in 1938, along with Claude Lévi-
Straus, he was a founder of the Society of Ethnography and Folklore in
Rio de Janeiro.
Andrade's commitment to nation-building was so strong, in fact, that
he never left Brazil to travel to Europe. But for all this he was not an ar-
rogant and naive nationalist; to the contrary: the peculiar thing about his
"heroi sem nenhum carater"-the hero without a character referred to
in the subtitle of the book-is that he is a "bad" savage, conceived in op-
position to the standard view of a national hero as the incarnation of the
nation's values. He is devoid of good feelings, lazy, cunning, a liar, a
boaster, a brawler. His first words are: "1 can't be bothered." According
to Koch-Grünberg, his name in Taulipang legend is formed frmu the
word maku (malicious) and the augmentative suffix -ima: Macunaima
therefore means "Big Nasty." Andrade chose him as the main character
ofhis story, and as a national ernblem, precisely because he was struck by
the fact that Koch-Grünberg described Macunairna as a hero without a
character-a word that Andrade interpreted in the sense of national
character. In the unpublished preface of 1926 he eXplained his purpose
in the following terms:
The Brazilian has no character ... And with the word "character" 1
do not refer only to a moral reality; 1 understand rather a permanent
mental entity, manifesting itself in everything, in customs in outward
action in feeling in language in History in process, as much in good as
in evil. The Brazilian has no character because he possesses neither a
civilization ofhis own nor a traditional conscience. The French have a
character, and so do the Yoruba and the Mexicans.Whether a distinc-
tive civilization contributed to it, an imminent danger, or a secular
conscience, the fact remains that they have a character. Not the Brazil-
ian. He is like a young man of twenty: one can readily perceive gen-
eral tendencies, but it is too early yet to make any positive statement
. . . And while 1 was reflecting upon these things 1 came across
Macunaima in Koch-Grünberg's German [text]. And Macunaima is a
stunningly characterless hero. 77
The strength of Andrade's enterprise lies in its clear-sightedness and

what might be called its critical and self-reflective nationalisrn. As a na-
tive of a young and impoverished country, Andrade knew that he could
not do batde with the great cultural nations on equal terms; he knew
that inequality was not only suffered but internalized, and that Brazil's
The Tragedy of Translated Men 1 29 1

history of dependency, its distinctive poverty, and the absence ofliterary
resources prevented the formation of a national character, which is to
say a stock of capital, as well as the emergence of a common language
and a common literature as sources of national pride and reverence. He
thus described inequality-the absence of history, of culture, of litera-
ture, of language-in terms of a sort of physiological deformity: "The
hero sneezed and fell to the ground. As he was wiping hirrlself he felt
himself growing bigger and getting stronger until he reached the size of
a strapping young man. However, his head, which had not been doused,
stayed the sarne as before-the nasty, oafish mug of the child he had
been."78 Andrade's proclamation of literary independence was not con-
ceived as a gesture of naive national celebration, nor did it spring from a
simple desire to ennoble a culture at any cost; it was the expression of a
deliberate attitude of self-derision and of a scathing inquiry into na-
tional weakness and cowardice.
Andrade invented instead a paradoxical form of nationalism, a way of
belonging that through its awareness of the many paradoxes-indeed,
impasses-on which Brazilian identity was based, and through its un-
usually keen sense of irony, managed to overcome the curse that hangs
over an impoverished people. Despite his disillusionrnent (and his real-
ism), Andrade made a genuine attempt to provide the Brazilian nation
with foundations: hence the metaphor of Macunaîma and his two
brothers representing the three constituent ethnic groups of Brazil-
white, black, and red-and affirrning, as Pierre Rivas has put it, the
"vitality of a young people rich in its diversity" as against "the ear-
lier eugenicist and racist myths deploring the decadence of a mongrel
Brazil."79
Sorneone capable ofwriting "1 am a Tupi Indian playing the lute"-a
striking epitorne of Andrade's cultural sense of being torn between
two cultures, of his sense of personal and collective tragedy-could not
help but present hirnself as a living paradox. 80 It is for this reason that
Macuna{ma can today be considered as standing for all founding national
narratives, a multiple and complex work-at once national, ethnologi-
cal, modernist, ironic, disillusioned, political and literary, lucid and will-
fuI, anticolonial and antiprovincial, self-critical and fully Brazilian, liter-
ary and antiliterary-that raises the constitutive nationalism of destitute
and emergent literatures to its highest degree of expression.

This kind of dissirnilating approach therefore consists in the complex
reappropriation of a central language that permits native writers to draw
attention to their differences. Their defense of the claim of a spoken
popular language to national and/or literary status is capable of accom-
rnodating a variety of fonns and degrees of dissirnilation-simple differ-
ences in accent, regional rnodes of expression, dialects or creoles. The
littérarisation of the oral language makes it possible not only to manifest a
distinctive identity but also to challenge the standards ofliterary and lin-
guistic correctness-which are inseparably gramrnatical, semantic, syn-
tactical, and social-irnposed by literary, linguistic, and political dornina-
tion; and also to provoke dramatic ruptures that are at once political (the
language of the people as nation), social (the language of the people as
class), and literary. One of the techniques rnost commonly enlployed
by writers involves the use of obscenity and offensive language (what
rnainstreanlliterary cri tics cali "vulgarity") ,81 which expresses a desire to
break with established conventions through an act of specifically literary
violence.
WaltWhitnun, for example, altered not only the rules of poetic form
but the English language itself in Leaves of Grass, introducing archaicisms,
neologisms, slang and foreign words, and, of course, Arnericanisms. In-
deed, the birth of the American novel may be said to coincide with
the pioneering use of the oral language in Mark Twain's Huckleberry
Finn (1884), whose crudeness, violence, and anticonformism marked a
definitive break with British literary norrns. The American novel as-
serted its difference by insisting upon a specifie idiom freed fronl the
eonstraints of the written language and the rules ofEnglish literary pro-
priety. As Hemingway famously remarked, "AlI modern Arnerican liter-
ature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn ...
There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."82
With Huckleberry Finn the literary world and the American public be-
came aware of the existence of a peculiarly American oral language-
and therefore of a distinctive "Arnericanness," a national difference rest-
ing on all the dialectical variants of the Arnerican melting pot, a joyous,
iconoclastie distortion of the language bequeathed by the English.
In the same fashion, if it has been possible to speak of a Glasgow
School in connection with three Scottish novelists who first appeared in
the early 198os-Alasdair Gray (b. 1934), James Kelman (b. 1946), and
Torn Leonard (b. 1944)-this is because they all made explicit use of a

popular language that carried with it political implications: aIl of thern
were associated with the Scottish nationalist movernent, and all of them
sought to give literary existence to an urban working-class language that
was seen as an essential element of the Scottish nation-this as against
the bucolic rural images of the nation, farniliar since Herder, as the con-
servatory of ancient legends and of the genius of the people. Kelman's
great subversion, for his part, consisted in the radical (indeed, exclusive)
use of this popular language in his novels. In so doing he broke with the
convention (itself indissociably literary and political) that when ordinary
people speak in a novel, the register and level of language must be
changed: thus so-called spoken style is reserved for dialogue while the
narrator employs an elevated diction in keeping with literary canons of
elegance. This convention, Kelman argued, rests on an assurnption in-
herent in the functioning ofliterature as a social practice: there is "a wee
game going on between writer and reader and the wee garne is 'Reader
and writer are the same' and they speak in the same voice as the narra-
tive, and they're unlike these fucking natives who do the dialogue in
phonetics."83 Thus in his novel The Busconductor Hines (I984) Kelman
reproduced the rhythms and idioms of Glaswegian speech (without,
however, resorting to phonetic transcription in the way that Tom Leon-
ard was to do) and signaled the equivalence of dialogue and narration
through the absence of commas and quotation marks. Kelman emphati-
caIly rejected characterizations of his language as "crude" and "ob-
scene," despite the high frequency in his writings of terms that violate
the customary norms of literary propriety: in challenging national and
social hierarchies he also meant to erase the distinction between po-
lite words and dirty words.While remaining within the English lan-
guage, he managed through the illustration and defense of a popular
language-affirrned as a specifically Scottish mode of expression-to
create a difference that was both social and national.
The issue of language can therefore be seen to be the primary force at

work in the formation ofliterary space, the occasion and subject of de-
bates and rivalries. I-Iistorians of Brazilian literature, for example, have
shown that the desire, reaffirrned by several generations of poets and
novelists, to create a language that is specificaIly Brazilian in its usages as
weIl as in its vocabulary has been the catalyst for the emergence of a na-
tionalliterature and a nationalliterary culture. There the very attempt to

define the use and form of the language gave the first internaI quarrels
their own content and, in providing a focus around which the entire
space could be organized and unified, revealed what was at stake in these
struggles.
The disagreernents betweenJorge Arnado (1912-2001) and Mario de
Andrade in Brazil in the 1930S are characteristic of the type of contests
that take place everywhere and lead to the unification of literary space.
Amado's early works drew their inspiration from working-dass life and
were marked by a frankly political perspective. 84 He joined the Com-
munist Youth in 1932, and at the end of that year and the beginning of
1933 wrote his second novel, Cacâu (Cacao, 1933), under the influence
of the Soviet "proletarian novel" that was beginning to appear in trans-
lation with several publishing houses in Sào Paulo.While searching for
the techniques he needed to describe the poverty of the peasants and
working classes in the northeastern part of the country, he remained
faithful to the neonaturalist conventions inherited from the proletarian
novel: "The decisive event for us was the Revolution of 1930, which
displayed an interest in Brazilian reality that modernisrn did not have,
and a knowledge of the people that we had and that the modernist writ-
ers absolutely did not have." He wished to introduce to Brazil a literary
revolution that would also, unavoidably, be a political revolution as weil:
"We did not want to be modernists but modern: we were fighting for a
Brazilian literature that, being Brazilian, would have a univers al charac-
ter; for a literature integrated with the historical marnent that we were
living through and that took inspiration from our reality in order to trans-
form it."85
Amado therefore rejected Brazilian modernism, which appeared to
hirn as an expression of a "bourgeois" sensibility, and whose formaI in-
novations seemed to him contrived precisely because it could not lay
daim to any popular "authenticity": "The language of Macuna{ma is an
invented language, it's not a language of the people ... modernisrn was a
formaI revolution, but, from the social point of view, it didn't have much
to offer."86 Synge had been violently attacked in the same terrns in Dub-
lin at the beginning of the century, accused of bringing to the stage a
language of the people that was doubly false-incorrect from the point
of view of national norms and unacceptable as a means of portraying the
people in political terms.
The case of Brazil shows that writers who succeed in bringing about

a linguistic rupture within their own language can lead a country to
genuine literary (and national) independence. This break with the past
makes it possible to give forrn and expression to the difference that is
thereby proclairned as a national identity. Brazil rnanaged to establish an
autonornous literary existence on the basis of the dispute over rnodern-
ism in the I92os-a dispute that was sustained and, in a sense, reinforced
politicaily by the ongoing linguistic struggle that it legitimized. The
campaign for a distinctively Brazilian language--different ffOln Portu~
guese in every detail, right down to its spelling-was to a large extent
the result of this upheaval, which lastingly altered the rules of writing,
both for writers and lexicographers. In this sense, the use of the oral lan-
guage pioneered (or revived) by Mârio de Andrade in Macunaima was
one of the Inost important stages in the recognition of the specificity of
Brazilian language and culture.
SWISS CREOLENESS
The ernbrace of an oral (often popular) language as a specifically literary
instrument of emancipation unites writers who otherwise seem to have
nothing in comrnon: despite their discrepant literary histories, they oc-
cupy very similar positions in world literary space. Thus it becomes pos-
sible to make an almost terrn-by-term comparison of two manifestos
cailing for the literary conversion and use of popular languages, one a
rural dialect (or "patois") and the other a creole. Issued seventy-five
years apart, these manifestos were com.posed by writers from regions
dominated by French literary space in two distinct ways. The author of
the first, Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, a Francophone Swiss, belonged to
an area that was literarily (though not politicaily) dominated by France,
the canton of Vaud, where a literary patrimony had not yet been able to
be constituted, since ail its literary productions up until then had been
annexed to those of France. Ramuz's nlanifesto was cailed Raison d'être,
which, as we have noted, appeared as the first issue of the Cahiers vaudois
in I9I4. The authors of the second Inanifesto, Jean Bernabé, Patrick
Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, were born on the island of Marti-
nique in the West Indies, a department of France and an emerging liter-
ary space that had long endured colonial dontination. Their nlanifesto,
Éloge de la créolité (In Praise of Creoleness), appeared in I989, exactly
three-quarters of a century after Rarnuz's proclamation ofliterary inde-
pendence.

Rarnuz, having failed ta make ~ name for himself as a writer in Paris,
returned ta his native land and atternpted ta create a distinct voice for
himself in French. The Martinicans, for their part, asserted a creole iden-
tity in arder ta oppose both French literary norms and the poetical and
literary revolution launched in the I930S by their elder cornpatriot,
Aimé Césaire (b. I9I3), under the banner of Negritude. Their firstjoint
gesture was to reject the stigrna ordinarily attached to the popular lan-
guage of their country and to proclaim as a positive difference what had
previously been condernned as provincial and incorrect. Like Bernabé,
Chamoiseau, and Confiant after hirn, Rarnuz ernphasized that patois
and creoles had long been despised and exposed to ridicule, above all by
the very persons who spoke thern, victims of the iITlposition of the
norrns of French in their lands; their languages-vaudoiseries on the one
hand, petit-nègre on the other-had always been an abject of caricature,
the "old shell of self-defamation" in the Martinican case,87 rnockery in
the Vaudois case. Ramuz wrote in praise of "our patois which has so
ITlUch Havor, apart from [its] briskness, cleanness, decisiveness, straight-
forwardness (precisely the qualities that are most lacking to us when we
write 'in French'); we seem to remember this patois only in broad com-
edy or farce, as if we were ashamed of ourselves."88
These authors also wished to give written form, which is to say both
a codified graITllnar and literary existence, to a popular language that
until then had had only an oral existence. 89 "0 accent," Rarnuz wrote,
"you are in our words, you are the thing that informs, but you are not
yet in our written language. You are in our gestures, you are in our
walk."90 The Caribbean writers, for their part, declared it necessary to
learn "the Creole language, its syntax, its grammar, its vocabulary, its
ITlost appropriate writing (even if this is foreign to French habits), its in-
tonations, its rhythms, its spirit ... its poetics."91
As almost everywhere in the world at moments of literary formation
and foundation, the first move was ta reappropriate oral popular culture:
"Caribbean literature does not yet exist," the Martinican writers an-
nounced at the outset of their manifesto. "We are still in a state of
preliterature."92 This is why use of the spoken language and reference to
oral popular culture were to be the basis of this new literature:
Provider of tales, proverbs, "titim," nursery rhymes, songs, etc., orality

is our intelligence; it is our reading of this world ... To return to it,

yes, first in order to restore this cultural continuity (which we associate
with restored historical continuity) without which it is difficult for
collective identity to take shape ... To return to it, so as simply to in-
vest the primordial expression ofour common geniu5 ... In short, we shall cre-
ate a literature, which will obey all the demands of modern writing
while taking root in the traditional configurations of our orality.93
For Rarrmz, it was a question of restoring linguistic authenticity. As

the founder of a new style, the product of a country and a countryside,
Ramuz pioneered the literary transcription of the language ofhis native
land as it was actually spoken there. The stylistic revolution that he car-
ried out in the 1920S (and that conventionalliterary history attributes
to Céline alone) consisted in letting the "people" speak in novelistic
fiction, in rnaking therrl talking characters, even narrators in the unfold-
ing of the story. Popular speech is not only embodied in dialogue in his
books; it is integrated into the narration itself. The fornul, linguistic,
aesthetic, and social aspects of Ramuz's innovation-everything, in fact,
except his political perspective-were to be recreated sixty years later by
the Scottish novelist James Kelnun. Ramuz explained his deliberate
technique in a letter to Paul Claudel in which he summed up the lowly
literary status assigned to popular language: "The novel has furnished
innmnerable authors with an excuse both to despise and to flatter the
people (what is left of them) and the language of the people, which is
the only one that counts, because everything cornes fronl it, because ev-
erything goes into it, and because it cannot be mistaken; but which these
fugitives from the Sorbonne use only between quotation marks, which
is to say they touch it only with tweezers."94
Ramuz and the three Caribbean writers share the sanle view of the
"littleness" of their lands that led Rarnuz to fornl a higher opinion not
only ofhis country but of its countryside: "It is quite srnall, our country,
but so much the better. This way l can get rrly arrrlS around ail of it and
at a glance take it ail in ... And in envisaging it thus, in its entirety, at a
glance, 1 manage to understand it more easily, to understand its 'tone,'95
its character, and then l can forget about all the rest."96 "Our world,"
wrote Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant, "however small it might be,
is large in our minds, boundless in our hearts, and for us will always re-
flect the human being."97 Their affinnation of the intrinsic value of the
country and the people, despised, neglected, and devoid of literary re-
sources though they rnight be, was another way of battling against the

norn1s instituted by the center, a way of dairrling the right to literary ex-
istence and equality. Just as Rarnuz insisted that the rnost humble things
and people, notably the country people of his region, be made legiti-
mate literary subjects, the creole writers stated that the literature they
were deterrrlÎned to invent "takes it as a principle that there is nothing
petty, poor, useless, vulgar, or unworthy of a literary project in our
world."98
The rnanaging editor of the Cahiers vaudois and the architects of
creoleness also have in common a distaste for theoretical approaches to
literature: "Ordinary terrorism," the three Caribbean writers daimed,
"supported distinguished theory, both powerless to save the least light-
hearted song from oblivion. Thus went our world, steeped in inteilec-
tualist piety, completely cut off frorn the roots of its orality."99 In Ramuz
one finds a sirrlilar preference for "sensibility" and "emotion," a return
to basic things in opposition to acaderrlÎcisrr1 in texts and language:
"Ought we not therefore to break at last with our inteilectualism, if that
is what it is cailed, as l suppose, and to unleash instinct?"100
Finally, ail these writers are united in rejecting regionalism and con-
cerned to defend theillselves against the charge of retreating into then1-
selves. Ramuz remarked:
One hears a great deal of talk these days about "regionalism."We have
nothing in common with these lovers of "folklore." The word (an An-
glo-Saxon word) seems to us as unpleasant as the thing itself. Our
practices, our customs, our beliefs, our ways of dressing ... ail these
petty things, which until now have alone seemed to interest our liter-
ary enthusiasts, not only are of no importance to us, but moreove~
seem to us singularly suspect ... The particular can be, for us, only a
point of departure. One attends to the particular only out of love for
the general and in order to attain it more sm"ely.l0l
But even though Ramuz, using the rhetoric of denial, dissociated him-
self frorr1 any arrlbition of founding a nationalliterature, plainly the sarr1e
logic is involved: "Let us leave to one side," he wrote, "any daim to a
'nationalliterature': this is at once too much and not enough to claim.
Too much, because a literature can be cailed national only when there is
a national language and we do not have a language C!f our own; not enough,
because it seems that the things by which we then clairn to distinguish
ourselves are sirnply our external dijjèrences. "102 But he intended to daim a

boundary that had been assigned to it as a literary stigma, in order to
find a position that would permit hirrl to "invent" a novel approach and
to avoid the alternatives of annexation pure and sirrlple (that is, of be-
coming French) and nonexistence (ofbeing Swiss and marginalized as a
provincial). For their part, Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant declared:
"We object to the parochialisrn and self-centeredness that sorne people
find in [creoleness]. There can be no real opening to the world without
a [prior] and absolute apprehension of what we are." Considering the
necessity of attaining universality as another type of submission to the
French order, they called for the creation of" diversality" -a universal-
ity reconciled with the diversity of the outlying regions of the world:
"Creole literature will have nothing to do with the Universal, which is
to say the disguised adherence to Western values ... This exploration of
our singularities ... leads back to what is natural in the world ... and
opposes to Universality the great opportunity of a world dittracted
but recornposed, the conscious harrnonization of preserved diversities:
Diversality."lo3
Reading the two rrlanifestos together brings out an essential point
that separate studies would undoubtedly miss: though they come from
wholly ditterent historical situations and apparently incomparable liter-
ary worlds, Ramuz and the Creole novelists cali for a break with prevail-
ing aesthetic norms in very similar terms, using the same argurnents.
Several points of ditterence and divergence ought nonetheless to be em-
phasized in order to make the similarities clearer. One needs first to dis-
tinguish the purely literary-but nonetheless real and symbolically con-
straining-domination suttered by Francophone Switzerland frorrl the
political domination exerted over the island of Martinique, where it
gave rise in turn to literary domination. In other words, Ramuz sought
to legitimize the cause of literary emancipation through the demand for
a popular literary language that to sorne extent he succeeded in creating;
his counterparts sought to escape a form of control that was both liter-
ary and political while refusing a purely political alternative.
A second major distinction has to do with the irnportance ofliterary
resources. In the interval since Césaire launched his revolution in the
narrle of N egritude-a movement recognized and consecrated in the
center·""-a genuinely Caribbean literary tradition, a native literary patri-
mony, had come into existence. The movement on behalf of créalité
therefore errlerged against the background of a literary and political his-

tory in which a local struggle nlanaged to achieve worldwide recogni-
tion. Ramuz, by contrast, could not look to a native literary history.
Lacking any preexisting regional or national model and, therefore, any
literary capital, he was forced to invent a tradition on the basis of noth-
ing (or almost nothing): "Thus the sad state of affairs that awaited those
of us who canle back: no example; no certainty; no model arnong cur-
rent writers; no rnodel among ones before us. One could not tail to see
that ail those who until then had shown sorne vitality in this country
had been elevated to true success and self-affirmation only ajter having
crossed the border, after having denied us, or more simply forgotten us. "104
Yet despite these differences, the four writers underwent the same
evolution. The two rnanifestos, published seventy-five years apart, were
identical in their effect: instead of distancing their authors frorn the cen-
ter, whose legitimacy they had initiaily rejected (and afIirrned in the
process of rejecting), and instead of breaking with it once and for ail,
these proclamations of independence had the paradoxical consequence
of perrnitting thern to be noticed and recognized by the authorities in
Paris. Thus Ramuz was published ten years later by Bernard Grasset,
who brought him recognition not only in France but internationaily.
His views on linguistic questions were the object of a lively critical
debate: the famous Pour ou contre C.-E Ramuz [For or against C.-F.
Ramuz], in which he was accused of "writing badly," appeared in
19 2 6. 105
In sirnilar fashion, critics in Paris transformed what the spokesmen of
creoleness had conceived as a rupture with French linguistic and politi-
cal norms into a simple stylistic and sernantic innovation. Once again
recognition was achieved at the cost of a reappropriation of peripheral
concerns by the center, with the result that the Martinicans' desire to af-
firm a literary politics was neutralized by their acceptance into the class
of writers of "French literature." The Parisian discovery of the Carib-
bean novel, which extended even to the most conservative precincts of
fictional aesthetics in France--the Goncourt jury---was the occasion
not of accepting the properly creole dimension of this writing, but of
celebrating the greatness and genius of the national language and of re-
joicing in the success and triumph of writers from the fonner colonies
on the English model. Neither Confiant nor Charnoiseau any longer
spoke, as they had do ne at the beginning of their careers, of writing in
Creole and publishing in their countries; instead they abandoned West

lndian publishers for the rnost prestigious houses in Paris and adopted a
creolized French that all Francophone readers could understand.
None of this, however, alters the fact that the desire to establish one-
self through the assertion of a linguistic difference within a great literary
language is one of the major ways to subvert the literary order, which is
to say to challenge all at once the aesthetic, grarnrnatical, political, and
sociallegacies of a colonial pasto

10 1 The Irish Paradigm
During the building of the wall and ever since to this very day 1have occupied myself almost
exclusively with the comparative history of races-there are certain questions which one can
probe to the marrow, as it were, only by this method.
-Franz Kafka, "The Great Wal/ of China"
The period 1900-1914 was that of the Dublin School-Yeats, Moore, Joyce, Synge, and
Stephens. The sentiment of these writers was anti-English ... For them England was the
Philistine and since they could not use Gaelic, their aim was to discover what blend of An-
glo-Irish and French would give them an explosive that would knock the pundits of London
off their padded chairs.
-Cyril Connol/y, Enemies of Promise
IT CAN HARDLY be claimed that the general pattern of the great families of
cases that we have just examined, a set of infinitely diversified strategies
employed by writers from outlying countries in world literary space,
captures reality in aIl its complexity. What 1 have hoped to do instead is
to give a glirnpse of the misfortunes, the contradictions, and the dif-
ficulties fàced by writers on the periphery in relation to those in the
center who, blinded by the obviousness of their centrality, cannot even
irnagine these things; but also to show the global structure of depen-
dence in which they are caught up in relation to those who, as captives
of the shadows of the periphery, have only a partial view of it.
Ideally it would have been possible to analyze carefully each of the
exarnples sketched in the previous chapters, 100 king at thern in relation
to one another both at a given rnoment and over time. Since a precise
and detailed description of every literary space is impossible in a work of
this scope, however, and in order to avoid an overly abstract descrip-
tion-one whose very abstraction would reveal its arbitrariness-I pro-
pose instead to devote a separate chapter to the Irish case, which rnay
serve here as a paradigrn, in the Platonic sense, that will give SOIne idea
of what it would have been necessary to do to give a cornplete account
of each of the cases already discussed.
An examination of the Irish Literary Revival, which took place over a
period of about forty years, between roughly I890 and I930, makes it
possible to lay out chronologically and spatially the entire set of solu-
tions devised by writers to the problern of overturning the dominant or-
der as weIl as the structural rivalries with which they are faced. The Irish
Revival, in other words, furnishes a compact history of the revoIt against
the literary order. Reconstructing this case in detail will therefore also
provide a paradigm for the generative model 1 have elaborated, contain-
ing the full range of political and linguistic solutions, the whole gamut
of positions, from Shaw's assimilation to Joyce's exile: in short, a theoret-
ical and practical framework making it possible to recreate and under-
stand literary revolts in general (looking at both prior and later exarn-
pIes) and to give a comparative analysis of quite different historical
situations and cultural contexts. 1
The distinctive quality of the Irish case resides in the fact that over a
fairly short period a literary space eluerged and a literary heritage was
created in an exemplary way. In the space of a few de cades the Irish lit-
erary world traversed aIl the stages (and aIl the states) of rupture with the
literature of the center, providing a model of the aesthetic, formaI, lin-
guistic, and political possibilities contained within outlying spaces. Here,
within Europe itself, immobilized under colonial control for more than
eight centuries, was a land that disposed of few literary resources of its
own at the moment when the first calls for a national culture were is-
sued; and yet it was there that sorne of the greatest literary revolutionar-
ies of the twentieth century were to appear-reason enough, surely, for
talking of an Irish "miracle." The Irish case therefore rnakes it possible to
grasp the character of a literary space in both its synchronie and dia-
chronie aspects at once; that is, its overall structure at a given rnOluent
and the genesis of this structure according to a process that, ignoring

certain secondary historical differences, can be seen to be almost uni-
versaI.
With Yeats's poetry and his work in theater, Shaw's London exile,
O'Casey's realism, Joyce's continental exile, and the struggle of the
rnembers of the Gaelic League to de-Anglicize Ireland, one is con-
fronted not merely with the unique experience of a particular history
but with the general design of a nearly universalliterary structure. Ac-
cordingly, it bec ornes possible to comprehend the full historical nec es-
sity of what Kafka called the "connection with politics" in smalliitera-
tures; to comprehend the strange and complex link between aesthetics
and politics, the collective labor of accumulating a literary heritage-the
indispensable condition for ente ring international space-and the grad-
uaI development of literary inventions, which rnake it possible for new
literatures over time to acquire an increasing rneasure of autonomy. 2
Irish literature stands as one of the first great subversions of the literary
order.
YEATS: THE INVENTION OF TRADITION

The Irish Revival "invented" Ireland between r890 and r930.3 Drawing
inspiration from the Romantic movement, which had assigned writers
the task of exhurning an ancient national and popular patrimony and es-
tablishing literature as the expression of the "popular soul," a group of
intellectuals, Anglo-Irish for the most part-William Butler Yeats, Lady
Augusta Gregory, Edward Martyn, and George Moore to begin with;
then George Russell (known as JE), Padraic Colum, John Millington
Synge (whom Yeats was to meet in Paris), and Jarnes Stephens-under-
took to manufacture a nationalliterature out of oral practices, collecting,
transcribing, translating, and rewriting Celtic tales and legends. In seek-
ing to give popular narratives and legends literary stature, ennobled
through poetry and drama, their collective enterprise was oriented in
two principal directions: toward the revival and drarnatic presentation of
the great narrative cycles of the Gaelic tradition, now seen as incarnating
the Irish people; and the evocation of an idyllic peasantry as the reposi-
tory of the "national spirit" and instrument of a Gaelic mysticism. Thus
Cuchulain and Deirdre were regarded as incarnating the grandeur of the
Irish people and of the Irish nation. The work of earlier authors, partic-
ularly Standish O'Grady, who published a two-volume History of lreland:
Heroic Period (1 878-r 880) in London, supplied an initial repertoire of
The Irish Paradigm 1 305

legends that revivalist writers adapted to a variety of theatrical and nar-
rative purposes: 4 the version of the legend of Cuchulain was often re-
worked, thus making this character into a rnodel of national heroisrn.
Yeats began by bringing together popular narratives that collectively
restored a sort of Gaelic golden age. Fairy and Folk Tales C!f the Irish Peas-
antry (1888) did rnuch to disseminate and lend distinction to the genre
of the popular tale in lreland. It was imrrlediately followed by The Wan-
derings C!f" Oisin (1889) and, several years later, still in the same vein, by
The Countess Cathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892) and the cele-
brated Celtic Tivilight (1893), a collection of essays, narratives, and de-
scriptive accounts. These vol urnes serve to verity the hypothesis ad-
vanced here that in spaces deprived of aIl literary resources the first
irnpulse of writers influenced by Herder's ideas was to embrace a popu-
lar definition of literature and to collect specirnens of the popular cul-
tural practice of their countries in order to convert them into national
capital. Literature was first defined, then, as an archive of popular leg-
ends, tales, and traditions.
Yeats, like aIl intellectuals determined to found a national literature
and repertoire, very quickly turned his attention toward the theater:
from 1899 to 1911 he worked to create a distinctively Irish theater, con-
ceived both as the privileged instrument for comrrmnicating a national
literature and as a pedagogical tool for educating the Irish people. To-
gether with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn, Yeats founded the Irish
Literary Theatre in 1899. In 1902, now called the Irish National Theatre,
it presented Yeats's famous Cathleen ni Houlihan,5 and next his adapta-
tion for the stage, with George Moore, of a story from the Ossianic cy-
cle, Diarmuid and Grâinne. From 1904, having in the meantime found a
permanent home at the Abbey Theatre, the cornpany put on plays by
Synge, Lady Gregory, and Padraic Colum, aIl of whom deliberately
sought to elaborate a native idiorn: thus Synge used the language of the
Aran Islands, and Lady Gregory-with whom Yeats was to collaborate
for a time-wrote plays in the Kiltartan dialect. 6 The explicit intention
of this enterprise, at least at first, was to found a new Irish national litera-
ture that could speak to the people. "Our lTIOVernent," Yeats wrote in
1902, "is a return to the people, like the Russian movement of the early
seventies"; a de cade earlier, in The Celtic Twilight, he had claimed: "Folk
art is, indeed, the oldest of the aristocracies of thought ... it is the soil
where aIl great art is rooted."7

After this first, largely collective phase of elaborating a nationalliterary
corpus, Yeats-the prornoter and the leader of the Irish Revival and the
founder of the Abbey Theatre-came to be regarded in Dublin as in a
sense enlbodying Irish poetry. The Abbey quickly established itself as a
national institution: thanks to its initial accumulation of capital, Ireland
was able at last to clairn its own literary existence. Later, in 1923, as
though his own newly official status in the world of letters had been
confirrned through the recognition of Ireland's literary "difference,"
Yeats received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
At the saIne time his political rnoderation and growing hesitancy, at
least after the 19 l 6 uprising, rnade hirn an arnbiguous figure, the found-
ing father of a new Irish literature and at the sarne time a writer asso-
ciated with London literary circles, where his work had long been
adrnired. The perforrnance in London, in I903, by the infant Irish Na-·
tional Theatre of five plays it had just put on in Dublin won the unani-
rnous approval of the critics. This, together with the aid of an English
patron, enabled Yeats to acquire a fame that the Dublin critics alone
could not have given him. But it was this very fame that signaled his de·-
pendence in relation to a center frorn which he nonetheless professed to
keep his distance.
THE GAELIC LEAGUE: RECREATION OF A NATIONAL LANGUAGE

At the same time as the Protestant architects of the Irish renaissance
were irnparting literary value to the nation's literary "heritage" and sup-
plying, in English, the foundations for a new nationalliterature, an influ-
ential group of scholars and writers sought to prornote a national lan-
guage in order to put an end to the linguistic and cultural ascendancy
of the English colonizer. The Gaelic League (Connradh na Gaeilge),
founded in 1893 under the leadership of the Protestant linguist Douglas
Hyde and the Catholic historian Eoin Mac Néill, had as its stated pur-
pose the elimination of English in lreland, once British soldiers had
been expelled from the country, and the reintroduction of the Gaelic
language, whose use had greatly declined since the la te eighteenth cen-
tury. Generally speaking, the proponents of Gaelic were Catholic in-
tellectuals, men su ch as Patrick Pearse (later the leader of the 19 I 6 re-
bellion) and Padraic O'Conaire, who were much rnore committed to
political and nationalist action th an their Protestant counterparts.
The Irish Paradigm 1 3°7

The revival of Gaelic was an entirely new idea. No nationalist politi-
cal leader, neither O'Connell nor Parnell, had ever made it a political
theme. And yet, although the literary movement had been born of polit-
ical despair, the embrace of the native tongue represented a politiciza-
tion of the larger moveITlent of cultural emancipation. Even though
Irish had ceased to be a language of intellectual creation and COITununi-
cation, at least since the early seventeenth century, it was still spoken by
more th an half of the population until l 84o.With the great farnine of
l 847 Gaelic was further marginalized, so that by the second half of the
nineteenth century its use was lirnited to sorne 250,000 rural speakers,
arnong them the poorest in the land. Indeed, as Declan Kiberd has ar--
gued, the Irish language was now "the language of the poor and, in
truth, a decisive rnark of their poverty."s From then on the demands for
linguistic and national independence anlOunted to a sort of reversaI of
values portending a genuine cultural upheaval-all the rnore as the
country's political leaders had undertaken a campaign to promote the
learning of English, the language of business and modernity, which was
to encourage enùgration to America.
The success of the Gaelic League was so immediate that Yeats had to
rnake a diplornatic alliance with it. Very shortly thereafter, in October
I90I, he put on the first play performed in Gaelic, Douglas Hyde's
Casadh an tSugâin (The Twisting of the Rope) , taken from a Connacht
folktale. Joyce himself, despite his reservations, acknowledged the
League's success in a lecture titled "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages,"
delivered in Trieste in I907:
Now the Gaelic League has revived [the] use [ofthis language]. Every
Irish newspaper, with the exception of the Unionist organs, has at least
one special headline printed in Irish. The correspondence of the prin-
cipal cities is written in Irish, the Irish language is taught in most of
the primary and secondary schools, and, in the universities, it has been
set on a level with the other modern languages, su ch as French, Ger-
man, Italian, and Spanish. In Dublin, the names of the streets are
printed in both languages. The league organizes concerts, debates, and
socials at which the speaker of beurla (that is, English) feels like a fish
out of water, confused in the midst of a crowd that chatters in a harsh
and guttural tongue. 9
Despite the publication of a few works written during this period in

Gaelic, among thern the first novel in Irish, by Padraic O'Conaire, and

the texts of Patrick Pearse, the literary status of the language was long to
rernain equivocal. The fact that it was not really used in daily life, to-
gether with the absence ofboth a genuine literary tradition (interrupted
for alrnost three centuries) and a popular audience, rneant that the pro-
ponents of Gaelic had first to carry out the technical task of establishing
grarnmatical and orthographic norrns, and then to lobby for the intro-
duction of the language in the educational systern. The marginality and
artificiality of the literary use of Gaelic rnade translation necessary, with
the result that writers who chose it found then1selves in a paradoxical
position from the first: either to write in the Irish language and rernain
unknown, without a real audience; or to be translated into English and
so repudiate the linguistic and cultural rupture with the authority of
London that writing in Gaelic represented. The situation in which
Douglas Hyde found hirnself was rnore paradoxical still: although he
campaigned on behalf of an Irish national literature in Gaelic, he was
also "a founder of the Anglo-Irish literary revival," which is to say of
Irish literature in English. lO His works-including a Literary History of
lreland (1899), which described and analyzed the great epic cycles and
reproduced long translated extracts frorn theln; and a bilingual collec-
tion, The Love Sangs oj' Connacht (1893)-were to serve as a catalogue of
legends and folktales for writers of the renaissance who did not know
Irish. The predicament faced by the partisans of Gaelic is cornmon to ail
national writers who choose a language distinct from the colonial lan-
guage, since the struggle to establish a slnaillanguage is inevitably linked
from the start with issues of national politics-a proposition that is
borne out by the experience of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Norway at
the end of the nineteenth century, Kenya in the 1970s, Brazil in the
1930S, and Algeria in the 1960s, among other countries. Because the lin-
guistic battle involves the creation of a literature that itself is subject to
political criteria and the judgrrlent of political authorities, it is at once an
essential moment in the affirn1ation of a national difference and the
starting point for the constitution of an independent heritage.
ln Ireland, the desire to bring about the de-Anglicization of the
country, explicitly advocated by the Gaelic League, and to restore the
native language to its former position of preeminence also represented a
challenge to the influence of Protestant inteilectuals and their aesthetic
preferences upon the nascent national literature. The defense and pro-
motion of Gaelic by itself changed the nature of cultural and political
debate, making it possible at last to inquire into the nature of the cultural

bonds uniting Ireland and England, the definition of an independent na-
tional culture, and the relation between national culture and language.
The break with the English language arnounted to a declaration of cul-
tural independence, a refusaI to go on seeing the suc cess of Irish books
(and plays) depend on the verdict of London; or, more precisely, the in-
dependent existence clairned for a neglected language peculiar to Ire-
land, which was now championed in the name of a national culture and
literature, perrnitted Catholic writers to reappropriate literary national-
ism and to challenge the hegemony of Yeats and the revivalists of the
first generation-Protestants for the most part-over Irish literary pro-
duction and aesthetics. The linguistic gambit was a bold attempt, then,
in the name of the nation and the people, to deny Protestant intellectu-
aIs a rnonopoly over national cultural property.
Debate over the comparative merits of the two cultural options con-
tinued for a very long tirne and profoundly marked the whole founding
phase of rrlOdern Irish literature by perpetuating the division and rival-
ries between the proponents of Gaelic and the partisans of English. l1
The forrrler were recognized only in Ireland for literary activity con-
nected with politics; the latter very quickly achieved broad recognition
in London literary circles and beyond.
SYNGE: THE WRITTEN ORAL LANGUAGE

Rejecting the cut-and-dried political (and politicized) alternative be-
tween Gaelic and English that presented Irish writers with an unde-
cidable choice, John Millington Synge (1871-1909) introduced in his
plays the spoken language of Irish peasants, beggars, and vagabonds-
sonlething without precedent in the history of European drarna. This
language, Anglo-Irish (" extracted from dialects forbidden to writing," as
his French translator Françoise Morvan has put it), a sort of creole rnix-
ing the two tongues, was "neither good English nor good Irish but cre-
ation at the confluence of two languages."12 Like ail defenders of a true
literary autonorny conceived in terms of a language within a language,
as it were-a new, free, modern idiorn, irnpertinent in its rejection of the
usages of a written language that was fixed, dead, rigidified-Synge
worked out the writing of Anglo-Irish for the theater. In so doing he re-
fused to cut hirrlself off cornpletely frorn the formaI possibilities offered
by English, without, however, thereby submitting to the norrrlS and can-
ons of "English" literature. Yeats had emphasized how subversive and
3 ra 1 THE WORLD REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

courageous the use of rural speech as the language of theater and poetry
could be. But the question of the literary and national status of the pop-
ular language, recreated for the stage by Synge, was ambiguously posed.
Indeed, the scandal caused by the first performance of The Playboy of the
JiVèstern World at the Abbey Theatre in 1907 is partly explained by this
arrlbiguity: the play was condemned on the ground either that it was
"false," and therefore insufficiently realistic; or that it was too realistic,
indeed prosaic, and therefore contrary to the aesthetic conventions of
the theater.
Moreover, Synge clearly aligned himself with a rnoderate realism, re-
jecting both the aestheticisrrl and abstraction associated with Mallarmé
and the style of drama represented by Ibsen, understood in England as a
form of social criticism:
In the modern literature of towns, however, richness is found only in
sonnets, or prose poems, or in one or two elaborate books that are far
away fi'om the profound and common interests of life. One has, on
one si de, Mallarmé and Huysmans producing this literature; and on
the other Ibsen and Zola dealing with the reality oflife in joyless and
pallid words. On the stage one must have reality, and one must have
joy ... the ri ch joy found only in what is superb and wild in reality.13
O'CASEY: THE REALIST OPPOSITION

Yeats's aesthetic principles were not oilly criticized by the Gaelicizers.
They were also challenged by a younger generation ofEnglish-language
Catholic writers who upheld the claüns of realism against those of po-
etic drama. From the rnornent the Irish Literary Theatre was founded in
1899 Yeats found himself opposed frOln this quarter by men such as
George Moore and Edward Martyn, who had begun as an Ibsenite and
whose departure hastened the birth of the Irish National Theatre in
1902. And despite the strong imprint and great influence of the Symbol-
ism advocated by Yeats at the Abbey Theatre, aesthetic ambivalence re-
mained the rule: at the same time as Yeats's works were being produced,
Padraic Colum and Lady Gregory were staging fàrces, comedies of nun-
ners, and peasant dramas.
After 1912-13, but especially following the sudden rupture Of1916-
when Yeats distanced himself frorn his colleagues and took refuge be-
hind a hieratic, formalized drama, inspired by the ]apanese Noh, and in
his poetry celebrated solitude and the past-the realist aesthetic becarrle
The Irish Paradigm 1 3l l

established at the Abbey Theatre. The new generation of Catholic writ-
ers tried at first to contradict the legendary and rural world ofYeats and
his fi-iends by adopting the "peasant realisrn" later associated with the
work of the Cork realists, notably T. C. Murray and Lennox Robinson,
for nlany years the director of the Abbey Theatre. Then, chiefly under
the influence of Sean O'Casey, they turned toward an urban, nl0re po-
litical realisIT1-this at a pivotaI nl0ITlent in the political transforrnation
of the terITl "people," whose evolution can be monitored in an almost
ernpirical way. In the I920S the old Herderian sense of the word, tied to
national and rural values, was still current, but its new prodaimed equiv-
alence with the proletariat, a consequence of the Russian Revolution
and the increasing power of Comrnunist parties in Europe, now began
to be established and to transforrn the aesthetic assuITlptions of popular
drama inherited frorn Herder and his followers.
It was the work of Sean O'Casey (I880-I964) that established this
new type of popular realisrn in Ireland. By birth a Protestant, but fronl a
very poor faITlÎly, O'Casey was doser, socially and aesthetically, to Irish
Catholics than to the Protestant bourgeoisie. 14 Self-taught, and a union
activist, he was briefly in l 9 l 4 a ITlember of a socialist pararrlilitary
group, the Irish Citizen Arrny, which he quit the SaITle year and shortly
thereafter began writing plays that celebrated nationalisnl while point-
ing out the ambiguity and danger of heroic national mythologies. He
was also one of the first Irish writers openly to affirm his COlTImunist
loyalties. 15 His first plays, The ShadoUJ of a Gunman and Cathleen Listens
In, were produced in I923;Juno and the Paycock, perforrned the following
year, was an imrnense success. It was praised by Yeats, who believed that
it "contained the prorrlÎse of a new idea ... [and] foreshadowed a new
direction in Irish drama."16 The Plough and the Stars, staged in I926,
scarcely three years after Ireland had won its independence, was a high-·
spirited and implacable attack on the false heroes of the resistance to
English rule. Taking as his subject the farnous Easter I9I6 uprising, an
event erected into a foundational rnyth of national legend during the
years since, O'Casey larnbasted the improvisational character of the rev-
olutionary struggle and, above aIl, the influence wielded by the Catholic
church in its eagerness to take over frorn the English oppressor. The play
provoked riots, forcing its author to go into exile in England.
Despite the huge scandaIs that his work aroused, the urban and politi-
cal realisnl of O'Casey and his followers was adopted in turn by the vast
3 12 1 THE WORLD REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

majority of Irish dramatists. The passage from neoromanticisIT1-the
idealization and aestheticization of the peasantry, seen as incarnating the
essence of the popular "soul"-to realism-at first rural, then associated
with urban life and literary and political modernity-summarizes the
history and succession of popular aesthetics.
O'Casey's example, together with those of Yeats and Synge, illustrates
precisely the irnportance of the theater in ail emergent literatures. But
here, as elsewhere, the aesthetics, language, form, and content involved
in each of his works were the object of struggles and conflicts that
helped unify the space by diversifying the range of positions within it.
Just as Jorge Amado in Brazil during the 1930S chose to devote himself
to the proletarian political novel and privileged the social notion of the
"people," Sean O'Casey opted for a style of theater that was political,
popular, and realistic.
SHAW: ASSIMILATION IN LONDON

Like ail nascent literary worlds on the periphery, the Irish space spread
beyond the nation's borders. Thus George Bernard Shaw, born in Dub-
lin in 1856, became a great figure of the London theater. Awarded the
Nobel Prize in Literature two years after Yeats, in 1925, he incarnated
the canonical and obligatory career of Irish writers before the emer-
gence of a peculiarly Irish space: exile to London-a rnove that by the
end of the nineteenth century had corne to be considered a betrayal of
the Irish national cause.
Shaw belonged so completely to the same literary space as the reviv-
alists that he felt it necessary to state his opposition plainly, in the name
of reason, both to Yeats's folkloristic and spiritualist irrationalism and to
Joyce's iconoclastie arnbitions in fiction. Placing himself at an equal dis-
tance frorn his two countryrnen, he, too, sought to subvert English
norms, only by rejecting Irish national (and nationalist) values. Thus
John Bull's Other Island (1904) was a deliberately anti-Yeatsian play. But
Shaw was every bit as much opposed, and symmetricaily so, to Joyce's
literary purposes. In 1921 he delivered an ambiguous tribute (to say the
least) to Ul}'sses in a letter addressed to Sylvia Beach, who had sent him
serialized extracts of the text in the hope that he rnight agree to join in
a subscription aimed at covering the costs of the book's publication:
"Dear Madam, 1 have read several fragrnents of Ul}'sses in seriaI form. It
is a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilization; but it is a truth-
The Irish Paradigm 1 3 13

fül one ... To you, possibly, it may appeal as art ... But to rne it is aIl
hideously real."17 Not only did Shaw thus refuse to elevate to the rank of
art a realistic portrait that seemed to him contrary to the requirernents
of literature, but rnoreover he challenged the assurnption that, as an
Irishman, he should have felt obliged to ascribe a special artistic interest
to it.
Shaw nonetheless recognized the necessity and the legitimacy of Irish
nationalist dernands and constantly called attention to the poverty and
backwardness of Ireland, which were as much econornic as intellectual,
in relation to Europe as a whole. He defended his dual rejection ofEng-
lish irrlperialisrn and Irish nationalism by imputing to England the evils
of Ireland and, refusing to make a cause of Irish exceptionalisrrl, con-
verted it into a subversive socialist conviction instead. The social and
political criticism at work in his drama re:fiected a deterrnination to go
beyond the opposition between irrlperialisrrl and nationalism. Shaw had
a hÇ>rror of entraprnent by and within national (or nationalist) issues,
which he saw as provincializing literary production. Taken together, aIl
the things that he regarded as contributing to the historical backward-
ness of Ireland, including the intellectual underdeveloPlnent of a coun-
try singlemindedly bent upon winning its independence, trace the exact
boundaries of what he considered the sole homeland of literature in
English: London.
Integration with the center seemed to Shaw to assure the certainty of
a degree of aesthetic freedom and critical tolerance that a slnall national
capital su ch as Dublin, torn between the centrifugaI pull of British liter-
ary space and internaI self-affirmation, could not guarantee. Paradoxi-
cally, then, some writers are prepared to leave leave their country and
take up residence abroad in a literary capital in the name of denational-
izing literature, of rejecting the systematic appropriation ofliterature for
national purposes-a characteristic strategy of small nations in the pro-
cess of defining themselves or in danger of intellectual absorption by a
larger nation. In response to the accusations of national betrayal that
were brought against hirrl, Shaw maintained that he had not "chosen"
London over Dublin. London for him was a neutral place to which he
had sworn no oaths ofloyalty or attachment, a place that assured him of
literary success and liberty while also granting him the leisure of fully
exercising his critical faculty.
Shaw's career encapsulates the experience of aIl those writers whorn I

have called "assimilated"-those who, in the absence of any other alter-
native, or out of a refusaI to yield to the aesthetic injunctions of smalllit-
eratures, integrate themselves, as Michaux, Cioran, and Naipaul were to
do in the twentieth century, with one of the literary centers.
JOYCE AND BECKETT: AUTONOMY

The rupture provoked by James Joyce was the final step in the constitu-
tion of Irish literary space. Exploiting ail the literary projects, experi-
ments, and debates of the late nineteenth century, which is to say the lit-
erary capital accumulated by all those who came before him, Joyce
invented and proclaimed an almost absolute autonomy. In this highly
politicized space, and in opposition to the movement of the Irish renais·-
sance, which, as he said in Ulysses) threatened to become "all too Irish,"18
he managed to establish an autonornous, purely literary pole, thus help-
ing to ob tain recognition for the whole of Irish literature by liberating it
to sorne extent from political domination. As a young man, in 1903, he
had mocked Lady Gregory's excursions into folklore: "In fine, her book,
wherever it treats of the 'folk,' sets forth in the fullness of its senility a
class of mind which Mr. Yeats has set forth with su ch delicate skepticism
in his happiest book, 'The Celtic Twilight."'19 Two years earlier, in fact,
he had already strongly criticized the theatrical undertaking of Yeats,
Martyn, and Moore on the ground that it represented a loss of literary
autonomy and signaled the submission of writers to what he considered
the dicta tes of the public: "But an aesthete has a floating will, and Mr.
Yeats's treacherous instinct of adaptability must be blarned for his recent
association with a platforrn from which even self-respect should have
urged hinl to refrain. Mr. Martyn and Mr. Moore are not writers of
much originality."20
The question ofliterary autonomy in Ireland was played out through
a subversive use of language and of the national and social codes con-
nected with it. Joyce condensed and, in his own fashion, settled the de-
bate-inseparably literary, linguistic, and political-that pitted the pro-
ponents of Gaelic against those of English. His whole literary work can
be seen as a very subtle Irish reappropriation of the English language.
Joyce dislocated English, the language of colonization, not only by in-
corporating in it elements of every European language but also by sub-
verting the norms of English propriety and, in keeping with Irish prac-
tice, using obscene and scatalogical vernaculars to Inake a laughingstock
The Irish Paradigm 1 3l 5

ofEnglish literary tradition-to the point, in Finnegans Wake) of rnaking
this subverted language of domination a quasi·-foreign tongue. A main
part of his purpose, then, was to disrupt the hierarchical relation be-
tween London and Dublin so that Ireland would be able to assume its
rightful place in the literary world. "The Irish," as Joyce was fond of say-
ing already in Trieste, "condemned to express thernselves in a language
not their own, have stamped on it the rnark of their own genius and
compete for glory with the civilised nations."21
Although he belonged to the next generation, Joyce in a sense pur-
sued the same end as the revivalists. First in Dubliners-the rnajority of
whose stories were written in 1904-05, which is to sayat the very time
when the Abbey Theatre was founded-and then in Ulysses) he sought
to confer literary status upon Dublin by transforming it into a literary
place par excellence, ennobling it through literary description. But al-
ready in the early collection of stories the stylistic methods employed,
and the aesthetic perspective they represented, were wholly at odds with
the underlying assumptions ofboth Yeats's Symbolisln and the rural re-
alism that was opposed to it. Frorn the very beginning,Joyce's exclusive
concern with Dublin and urban life signaled his rejection of the peasant
folklore tradition and his determination to bring Irish literature into
European modernity. Dubliners proclaimed Joyce's refusaI to take up the
cause of the revivalists. Through the urban realisrn of these stories he
sought to irnbue Irish life with a certain mundaneness, to abandon the
grandiloquence of the literature of legendary heroism in order to em-
brace the novel trivialities of modern Dublin. "1 have written [the book]
for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness," Joyce said in a letter
to his publisher. 22 He disrnissed the project of the founders of the Re-
vival as a piece of aesthetic archaism that reflected the "backward" char-
acter of the country,23 emphasized earlier by Shaw, which was as much
political as intellectual and artistic. It was this total rupture with the
dominant literary aesthetic of the day in Ireland that explains the im-
mense difficulties Joyce encountered in trying to get his first collection
of stories published.
These difficulties were therefore the product of a double rejection,
not only of English literary norms but also of the aesthetic tenets of the
nationalist literature then being created. Determined to get past the
oversimplified alternative presented by colonial dependence-literary
emancipation or submission to the London authorities-Joyce attacked

"the national temper" in an effort to defend "the region ofliterature ...
assailed so fiercely by the enthusiast and the doctrinaire,"24 on the one
hand, and, on the other, denounced those who "surrender to the trolls,"
allowing the Irish theater to becorne "the property of the rabblement of
the most belated race in Ellrope."25 In other words, he opposed both
Catholic writers who transfonned literatllre into an instrurnent of na-
tionalist propaganda and Protestant intellectllals who reduced it to the
transcription of popular myths.
Joyce's dual opposition was spatial as well as literary: refusing to obey
either the law of London or that of Dublin, he chose exile on the conti-
nent in order to produce an Irish literature. Ultimately it was in Paris, a
politically nelltral ground and an international literary capital, that he
was to try to achieve this apparently contradictory result-thus placing
himself in a position that was eccentric in the fullest sense of the word.
Joyce settled in Paris, not in order to draw upon any rnodels he rnight
have found there, but to subvert the language of oppression itself. His
pllrpose was therefore both literary and political. 26 In the passage quoted
as an epigraph to this chapter, the Irish Protestant Cyril Connolly, who
left his native land and becarne a celebrated writer and critic in London,
expressed the British view of the detour taken by Joyce. Arguing that
the aim ofJoyce and other Irish writers ofhis generation was to discover
"a blend of Anglo-Irish and French" that would shock the London crit-
ics, Connolly noted that "all [ofthem] had lived in Paris, and all had ab-
sorbed French culture." He went on to indicate the place of Paris and
Dublin in the literary war unleashed against London: "The second
quarter was Paris which held in the attack on the new Mandarins the
line taken by Dublin against their predecessors thirty years before. It was
here that conspirators rnet in Sylvia Beach's little bookshop where Ulys-
ses lay stacked up like dynamite in a revolutionary cellar and then scat-
tered down the Rue de l'Odéon on the missions assigned to thern."27
The history of Irish literature was not finished with James Joyce.
Through his daim to literary extraterritoriality he not only gave Irish
literary space its contenlporary form; he opened up a connection to
Paris, thus providing a solution for all those who rejected the colonial al-
ternative of retreat to Dublin or treasonous emigration to London.With
Joyce, Irish literature was constituted in tenns of a triangle of capitals
formed by London, Dublin, Paris-a triangle that was less geographic
than aesthetic and that had been irnagined and created in the space of

sorne thirty or forty years: Yeats staked out the first nationalliterary po-
sition in Dublin; in London, Shaw occupied the canonical position of
the Irishman adapted to suit English requirements; Joyce, refusing to
choose between these cities, succeeded in reconciling contraries by es-
tablishing Paris as a new stronghold for the Irish, ruling out both con-
forrnity to the standards of national poetry and submission to English
literary norms.
The design of the literary structure constituted by these three cities
distilled the entire history of Irish literature, insofar as it had been "in-,
vented" between 1890 and I930, and held out to every aspiring Irish
author a range of aesthetic possibilities, engagements, positions, and
choices. This polycentric configuration became so much a part of the
mental habits of Irish writers, and of their view of the world, that still
today a writer such as Seamus Heaney, undoubtedly the greatest con-
ternporary Irish poet-born in 1939 in County Derry, Northern Ire-
land, professor from 1966 to 1972 at Queen's University of Belfast,
whère he had been a student, and winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize for
Literature, whose decision to settle in the Republic of Ireland a few
years earlier caused a scandal in his own country-can describe the
choices available to hirn in exactly the same terms. In an interview with
the French press he remarked: "If, like Joyce and Beckett, 1 had gone to
live in Paris, 1 would only have conformed to a cliché. If 1 had gone off
to London, this would have been considered an arnbitious but normal
course of action. But to go to [County]Wicklow was an act charged
with meaning ... When 1 crossed the border, my private life fell into the
public do main and the newspapers wrote editorials about my decision.
A queer paradox!"28 To this foundational and historic triangle rnust now
be added New York, which, owing to the presence there of a sizable
Irish-American conununity, represents at once an alternative to London
within the English-speaking world and a powerful pole of consecration
in its own right.
After Joyce, Samuel Beckett represented a sort of end point in the con-
stitution of Irish literary space and its process of emancipation. The
whole history of this national literary world is at once present and de-
nied in his career; but it can be grasped only by recognizing exactly
what he had to do to rescue himself from the danger of national, linguis-
tic, political, and aesthetic rootedness. In other words, to understand the
3 r8 1 THE WORLD REPUBLIC OF lETTERS

very "purity" ofBeckett's work, his progressive detachment from ail ex-
ternal definition, his almost absolute autonomy, it is necessary to retrace
the route by which he achieved formaI and stylistic freedom-a route
that is indissociable from the apparently more contingent and external
one that brought him frorn Dublin to Paris.
As a young writer in Dublin in the late 192os, Beckett was heir to the
tripolar configuration of Irish space l have just described. One cannot
fail to be struck by the importance it conferred upon these three capital
cities. Beckett's displacerrlents between Dublin, London, and Paris were
so many aesthetic atternpts to find his place in a literary space that was at
once national and international. Because he found himself in the same
situation that Joyce had twenty years earlier,29 Beckett took exactly the
sarne path-relying on Joyce to guide and justify his tastes, admiring the
writers Joyce adrrlired and dismissing the ones he did not, foilowing
Joyce in his exaltation of Dante and his sarcastic suspicions of the Celtic
prophets, and so on.
Paralyzed by his boundless admiration for an author who then repre-
sented for him the highest imaginable degree of freedom frorn the
norms imposed by nationalism, and, more than this, dumbfounded by
the power of the position Joyce had created in Paris, Beckett had great
difficulties until the war years finding his own way. Joyce's manner of
fictional invention was the only one he could conceive of. Seemingly
condemned to imitation or, worse, blind conformity, and driven to de-
spair at not being able to settle upon a literary project to which he could
commit himself, or even to choose a city where he could live (hesitating
between retreat to Dublin and exile-another form of imitation-in
Paris), Beckett searched for more th an a decade for a way out from the
aesthetic and existential impasse in which he found himself.
Though he was determined to use the autonomy that Joyce had
achieved to his own advantage, he sought to follow in the footsteps of
the older writer by other means. This meant relying upon the entire
Irish literary heritage, in addition to Joyce's own innovations, in order to
create a new and still more independent position. He therefore first had
to find a way around the literary alternative-realisrn or Symbolism-
imposed by the internaI struggles of the Irish field, then to overcome
what he called, in a letter in German addressed to Axel Kaun in 1937,
speaking ofJoyce's enterprise, "the apotheosis of the word"-that is, the
willful belief in the power of words;30 and, finaily, to take his place,

beyond Joyce, in an artistic genealogy that would inaugurate a new for-
maI modernity. Beckett's invention of the rrlost absolute literary au ton-
orny, the highest degree of literary subversion and emancipation ever
achieved, was therefore the paradoxical product of Irish literary history.
Accordingly, it can be perceived and understood only on the basis of the
whole of the history of Irish literary space.
GENESIS AND STRUCTURE OF A L1TERARY SPACE

As against the comrnonly held view that each national particularism,
each literary event, each work of literature is reducible to nothing other
than itself, and rerrlains incomparable to any other event in the world,
the Irish case furnishes a paradigm that covers virtually the entire range
ofliterary solutions to the problem of domination-and these in almost
perfectly distilled form.
1 have wished to exarrune the case of Ireland in order to show that the
rrlOdel proposed here is not an a priori construction of abstract elements,
but rather one that may be directly applied to the historical formation of
individualliteratures. It has several essential aspects. First, it demonstrates
that no literary project, not even the most formalistic, can be eXplained
in a monadic fashion: every project must be put in relation to the totality
of rival projects within the same literary space. Second, the Irish exam--
pIe makes it possible to explain how and why at any given mornent of its
history a particular literary field can be described in its entirety with ref-
erence to the set of competing contemporary positions. Finally, the Irish
case is a way of showing that each new path of invention that is opened
up, along with all those that have been blazed before, helps to form and
unify the literary space in which it appears and asserts itself 31
Contrary to what the individu al case studies of the previous chapters,
considered in isolation from one another, may seem to suggest, the solu-
tions devised by deprived writers take on their full meaning only once
they have been put back into the context of the specific history of their
respective literary spaces, which itself is part of an almost universal chro-
nology. Thus Beckett's relationship to Joyce, for exarnple, conceived as
something absolutely unique (a notion that itself derives from belief in a
literature that produces "pure" ideas in a sort ofPlatonic heaven), is typ-
ically taken to demonstrate the artistic independence of the disciple. 32
But even if it is true that Joyce was absent from Beckett's mature work
(from the 1950S on), he nonetheless remained central to Beckett's aes-

thetic position and choices: Beckett was a descendant-a paradoxical
one, to be sure, unacknowledged but nonetheless real-of ]oycean in-
vention.
Sorne theorists, such as Edward Said, have tried to incorporate Ireland
in a general rnodel of the postcolonial world. For Said, taking issue with
the fundamental assumptions of "pure" criticism, literature was one of
the main instruments by which colonialism and cultural domination are
justified. In order to break with these assumptions, which he saw as hav-
ing been reinforced, first by the "New Criticism" of the I940S and
1950S, and th en by deconstructivist criticism, Said sought in works such
as Orientalism (I978), and still more so in Culture and Imperialism (I993),
to give a new definition ofliterature and ofliterary reality by describing
the political unconscious that is at work in the French and English nov-
els of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Once the insistent but al-
ways unnoticed presence of colonial empire and colonized peoples is
recognized, through a method of interpretation that he calls "contra-
puntal," since it inverts the ordinary position of the reader in the struc-
ture and purpose of these novels (whether by Flaubert, Austen, Dickens,
Thackeray, or Camus), it is no longer possible to sus tain the view of a
radical disjunction between literature and the (political) events of the
world. The presence in these works of a colonial conception of the
world cails attention to the reality of relations of cultural domination
and thereby reveals the political truth of literature, hitherto obscured.
Said's work had the great merit of internationalizing literary debate,
showing that what he cailed the historical experience of empire is corn-
mon to everyone, colonizers and colonized alike, and of rejecting the
exclusive claims of linguistic and national criteria in favor of a literary
history whose groupings and classifications are informed by the histori-
cal experience of colonization and, later, imperialism.
Said therefore took an interest in the figure of W B. Yeats, whom he
described as "the indisputably great national poet who articulates the
experiences, the aspirations, and the vision of a people suffering under
the dorninion of an offshore power."33 Fredric ]ameson, for his part,
has tried to show that literary rnodernism-and notably]oyce's fonnal
investigations in Ulysses-were directly associated with the historical
phenomenon of imperialism, contending that the end of modernism
"coincide[s] with the restructuration of the classical imperialist world
system."34 Said and ]ameson were among the first critics, in other words,

to rnake the connection between the political history of countries that
have long suffered foreign domination and the ernergence of new na-
tional literatures. In doing this they prornoted a new type of corn-
parativism, using irnperialism as a 1110del to relate to one another works
that appeared in very different countries and historical contexts. Thus
Said was able, for example, to link Yeats's early poerns with those of the
Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. 35 Similarly, both Said andJarneson have ex-
plicitly rejected what Said in Culture and Imperialism called "the com-
fortable autonomies"-the unquestioned assu111ptions of pure, dehis-
toricized interpretations of poetry and, lllore generally, literature. Each
one in his own way has called for the rehistoricization-which is to
say, the repoliticization-ofliterary practices, even the lllOSt forrnalistic,
su ch as Joyce's Ulysses. In the same sense, and on the basis of the same
critical assumptions, Enda DuffY has proposed a national reading of
Joyce's novel, which she holds is a postcolonial work of literature that
portrays a simple "national allegory" and gives a narrative form to the
ideological and political conflicts of Ireland at the beginning of the
twentieth century.36
The "connection between imperial politics and culture," Said main-
tained, "is astonishingly direct."37 Although his readings ofliterary texts
were extre111ely shrewd, he regarded the aesthetic nature of a given
work, and its singularity, as matters for internaI criticislTl to decide. As
against this view, however, a plausible case can be l1lade that the link be-
tween literary form and political history requires that texts be consid-
ered in relation to the national and internationalliterary space that rne-
diates political, ideological, national, and literary stakes. The analysis 1
have developed here tends to cast doubt upon the possibility and validity
of a political reading of Ulysses, for example, on the basis of the factual
chronology of Irish politics alone.With the enlergence of a literary
space that becornes progressively more autonomous, that acquires its
own distinctive tempo and its own chronology, so that it is partially in-
dependent of the political world, it beconles difficult to insist upon a
strict correspondence between the political events that unfolded in Ire-
land between 1914 and 1921-the period during which Ulysses was
composed-and Joyce's text; to push the parallelisnl, as Enda DuffY does,
to the point of seeing homologies, or structural similarities, between the
narrative strategies of the novel and the political forces at work during
the Irish conflict of these years is even harder to justify. Nor can one

wholly endorse the claiIns of Declan Kiberd, though he does recognize
that "it was less easy to decolonize the mind than the territory" and ac-
knowledges that the eHects of dependence in Irish literature extended
far beyond the official dates of national independence. Kiberd's novel
and passionate approach to postcolonialisrn in Ireland, which he tries to
relate to the literatures of Africa and India, likewise interprets literary
events in terms of political structures and events ("the Irish were the first
Inodern people to decolonize in the twentieth century") without taking
into account, in its fi1l1 historical con1plexity, the structure of the world
republic ofletters as a whole and the position occupied in it by Irish lit-
erary space. 38

11 The Revolutionaries
The I~ish, condemned to express themselves in a language not their own, have stamped on it
the mark of their own genius and compete for glory with the civilised nations.
-James Joyce, lectures, 1905-06
For centuries correct national languages did not yet exist ... On the one hand there had been
Latin, which is to say the learned tongue, and on the other national languages, which is to
say vulgar tongues ... The end was [finally] reached, evreetheeng, absolootleeevreetheeng
wuz expresst in the formerly vulgur langwedge ... and this is preesycelee where
mattersstandtooday withlitrachoor ... since there is not, in a global way, any separation or
demarcation between the literary language and the correct national language ... the goal is
to create pleasure and not linguistic purity ... As a result writers can employ any method,
achieve everything that is achievable, evreetheeng, absolootlee evreetheenggoze! There is
therefore no obligation to respect Iinguistic norms ... You stop thinking that Vou must de-
fend the correct national language.
-Katalin Molnar, On Language
WHEN THE FIRST effects of revoIt, which is to say ofliterary differentiation,

make themselves felt, and the first literary resources are able to be
claimed and appropriated for both politicai and literary purposes, the
conditions for the forrnation and unification of a new nationailiterary
space are brought together: a nationailiterary heritage, if only a minirnai
one, has now been accumulated. It is at this stage that second-generation
writers such as James Joyce appear. Exploiting nationalliterary resources
that for the first tirne are regarded as such, they break away from the na-
tional and nationalist rnodel of literature and, in inventing the condi-
tions of their autonomy, achieve freedorn. In other words, whereas the
first national intellectuals refer to a political idea ofliterature in order to
create a particular national identity, the newcorners rder to autonornous
internationalliterary laws in order to bring into existence, still on a na-
tionallevel, another type ofliterature and literary capital.
The case of Latin America is exemplary in this regard. The period
known as the "boom," when writers frorn Central and South Arrlerica
achieved international recognition following the award of the Nobel
Prize to Asturias in l 967, represents the beginning of a proclamation of
autonorny. The consecration of these novelists and the recognition of a
distinctive aesthetic perrnitted them collectively to detach themselves
from what Alfonso Reyes (I889-I959) called the "ancillary" vocation of
Hispano-American literature and to reject pure political functionalism.
"The literature of Spanish Arnerica," Carlos Fuentes has written, "had
to overcome, in order to exist, the obstacles of fiat realism, COlnrnemo-
rative nationalism, and dogmatic commitment. With Borges, Asturias,
Carpentier, Rulfo, and Onetti, the Hispano-American novel developed
in violation of realism and its codes."l In the early years of the "boorn," a
debate developed within this transnational literary space between the
upholders of literature in the service of national and political causes (at
the time usually associated with the Cuban regime) and advocates oflit-
erary autonorny. The very emergence of this debate is a significant indi-
cation that the process of autonornization was then under way. In I967
the Argentinian writer Julio Cortazar (I9I4-1984), committed to the
cause of the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutionaries, and a nlember of
the Russell tribunal on the VietnamWar, nonetheless defended a posi-
tion of literary autonorny. In a let ter written in the aftermath of two
trips to Cuba, he told the editor of the Havana review Casa de las
Américas:
When 1 came back to France after these two trips, there were two
things that 1 understood better. On the one hand, my personal and in-
tellectual involvement in the struggle for socialism . . . On the other,
my work as a writer followed the orientation that my way of being
impressed upon it, and even if at a given moment my work reflected
this involvement, 1 did it for the same reasons of aesthetic fi-eedom that
currently le ad me to write a novel that takes place virtually outside of
The RelJolutionaries 1 32 5
time and historical space. At the risk of disappointing the catechists
and partisans of art in the service of the masses, 1 continue to be this
"cronopio" who writes for his own personal pIe as ure and suffering,
without the Ieast concession, without "Latin American" or "Socialist"
obligations understood as pragrnatic a priori assumptions. 2
These second-generation writers-"eccentric" in the fullest sense of

the word-become the architects of the great literary revolutions: each
using his own weapons, they fight to change the established literary or-
der. They are innovators who undennine the forn1s, styles, and codes ac-
cepted at the literary Greenwich rneridian, thus thoroughly changing,
renewing, sometimes even shattering the criteria of modernity and, as a
result, the practices of world literature as a whole. Joyce and Faulkner,
two of the greatest innovators of the twentieth century, each carried out
a revolution so great that the measure of literary time itself was pro-
foundly altered. They became-and to a large extent still are-'measur-
inK instruments, points of reference by which every work claiming a
place in the literary world can be evaluated.
International creators gradually build up a set of aesthetic solutions
that, once tested and modified in different historical and social contexts,
produce a genuinely international patrimony, a pool of specific strate-
gies reserved for the privileged use of writers on the periphery. Drawn
upon more or less everywhere in the world, endlessly reused and rein-
vented, the capital constituted by ail these new solutions to the problem
of domination allows su ch authors to refine and deepen the complexity
of their paths to revoIt and liberation. As a consequence of this accumu-
lation of a worldwide heritage, which enables writers in outlying spaces
to borrow stylistic, linguistic, and political techniques (and later to be
borrowed from in their turn) , there exists today a range of possibilities
that they can turn to in order to devise their own solutions-whether
aesthetic, linguistic, fonnal, or other-in response to the needs of a par-
ticular cultural, linguistic, or national situation. Those who, like Dario,
Paz, Kis, and Benet, go to the center to seek--to understand, assimila te,
conquer, rob . . .-literary wealth and possibilities that hitherto had
been denied them help accelerate the process of building up literary as-
sets in the srnall nations of the world.
It will be recalled that Octavio Paz, upon grasping the necessity of
entering the garne, which is to say of gaining access to central tin1e-the
literary present that could not be found in his own country-decided

"to go and look for it and bring it back home." This, Paz remarked, was
"why there was frequent talk of 'rnodernizing' our countries: the mod-
ern was outside and had to be imported."3 The major resource su ch
writers lack is time. Like national writers, but in different fonns and
ways, they therefore have either to devise shortcuts or to accelerate liter-
ary time. In the course of enlarging literary space, the great innovators
from the margins of the world of letters gradually make use of the
whole of the heretical transnational heritage that has been accurnulated
since the first successful revolutions. Thus, in the nineteenth and twenti-
eth centuries, the naturalist revolution, Surrealism, the Joycean revolu-
tion, and the Faulknerian revolution-products of different political and
historical spaces and contexts-furnished eccentric writers with tools
for modifying the relation of dependence in which they found them-
selves.
Whereas national writers, fomenters of the first literary revolts, rely
on the literary models of national tradition, international writers draw
upon this transnational repertoire of literary techniques in order to es-
cape being imprisoned in national tradition. Through recourse to the
values that enjoy currency at the Greenwich meridian, they create an
autonornous pole in a space that previously had been shut off from in-
ternational revolutions and, in this way, help to unify it. By the same to-
ken, the most autonomous writers of the smallliteratures are also for the
most part, as we have seen, translators: they import, directly by means of
translation or indirectly through their own work, the innovations of lit-
erary modernity. In countries of great but devalued historical capital, in-
ternational writers are at once introducers of central modernity and in-
ternaI translators, which is to say prornoters of a national capital. Thus
Sadiq Hidayat was both the translator of Omar Khayyaam into modern
Persian, as we have already noted, and the translator of Kafka.
Once consecrated, the great revolutionaries are themselves co-opted
in turn by the most subversive writers in deprived spaces and their ad-
vances incorporated into the body of transnational resources constituted
by the work of literary innovators everywhere. Joyce was thus at once
the creator of the first autonomous position within Irish literary space
and the inventor of a new aesthetic, political, and above aillinguistic so-
lution to literary dependence. There is an international genealogy, then,
that includes ail the great innovators honored as true liberators in the
peripherallands ofliterary space, a pantheon of great authors regarded as
The Revolutionaries 1 32 7
universal classics (such as Ibsen, Joyce, and Faulkner) that writers from
outlying countries can oppose both to central literary histories and to
the academic genealogies of national and colonial pantheons.
Cornbining the lucidity of the dorninated with a knowledge of the
current supply of autonornous aesthetic innovations, these writers are
now able to draw upon a fund of international resources whose avail-
ability throughout the world ofletters leads to a considerable increase in
the range of technical possibilities and causes the frontier of the literarily
unthinkable to begin to recede. Still rnore importantly, they are the only
ones who are able to discover and reproduce the aims and trajectories of
the great literary heretics, the great revolutionaries who, once they have
been canonized by their respective centers and declared univers al clas-
sics, lose a part of their historical context and, as a result, a part of their
power of subversion. Only the great subversives know how to search for
and recognize in history itself-that is, in the structure of domination in
literary space-authors who were in the same situation in which they
find thernselves and who m.anaged to discover the solutions that made
universalliterature. In this way they turn the central classics to their own
advantage and put them to new and specifie uses, as Beckett and Joyce
did with Dante, as Henry Roth was later to do with Joyce, Juan Benet
with Faulkner, and so on.
Revolutionaries such as Joyce and Faulkner provide the literarily des-
titute with a variety of new me ans for reducing the distance that sepa-
rates them from their centers. 4 They are able to accelerate literary time
because their formaI and stylistic innovations make it possible to trans-
form the signs of cultural, literary, and often economic destitution into
literary resources and thus to gain access to the highest modernity. By
radically transfornling the definition and limits assigned to literature
(with regard not only to wordplay but also to the sexual, the scatalogical,
and the prosaic aspects of urban life in the case of Joyce; in the case of
Faulkner, to the destitution of rural life) , they enable writers on the pe-
riphery who previously were denied access to literary modernity to take
part in international competition, using instrurnents that they them-
selves have forged.
DANTE AND THE IRISH

The paradigm of ail these subversive reworkings is surely the use that
the Irish (first Joyce, then Beckett and Heaney) rnade of Dante. They

reappropriated the work of the Tuscan poet-noble before aIl others-
as an instrunlent of struggle on behalf of cosmopolitan and antination-
alist Irish poets. Through a sort of reactualization of the linguistic and
literary project laid out in De vulgari eloquentia (On Vernacular Elo-
quence)-a project that only writers concretely and directly concerned
with the status of a national language in relation to the literary language
of their space could understand-Joyce and Beckett in turn recreated,
recovered, and invoked Dante's subversive power. 5 Dante becarrle at
once a resource and a weapon in the struggle of the most international
writers in the Irish space.
Joyce's fascination with Dante is weIl known. Nicknamed "the Dante
of Dublin" at the age of eighteen, he identified hirrlself with the great
Tuscan exile throughout his life. But it was Beckett, whose admiration
for Dante and knowledge ofDante's work was no less great, who was to
insist explicitly upon the structural similarity of their positions. His first
published text was an essay written in early 1929 at Joyce's request for
Our Exagmination round his Factification for lncamination of JMJrk in Progress)
a volmue conceived by Joyce in response to the sharp criticism in Eng-
land and America directed against what was to become Finnegans Wake)
fragrnents of which had appeared in various reviews. The essay, "Dante
... Bruno. Vico ... Joyce," made use of the sophisticated tools furnished
by Dante's On Vernacular Eloquence to mount a defense of the linguis-
tic-which is to say political-dimension of Joyce's enterprise. At bot-
torn it was both an anti-English manifesto and an attack against the
Gaelicizing Irish, challenging the stranglehold of the English language
over literature in Ireland while at the sarne time rejecting the inward-
looking irnpulse of the Irish Revival. Beckett drew upon Dante's argu-
ments in favor of an "illustrious vulgar tongue" in order to show that
Joyce's Work in Progress was ultimately a refusal to submit to the tyranny
of English: just as Dante had proposed the creation of an ideallanguage
that would have synthesized aIl the dialects of Italy, so Joyce, in creating a
sort of synthesis of aIl the languages of Europe, had invented an utterly
novel answer to English political and linguistic dornination.
Beckett himself, whose early fictions featured a Dantesque character
named Belacqua, was to rerrlain faithful to Dante's work throughout his
career as weIl. In rejecting in a specifically literary way the national
norms then current in Ireland, he took the same approach as Dante; and
Dante, revarnped and rnade the contemporary of the most international
The Revolutionaries 1 32 9
of Irish writers, took on a new dimension in his turn. Having been
rehistoricized and transformed into one of the founding fathers of mod-
ern Irish literature, Dante now assumed his place in the legitirnate heri-
tage of ail heretics, of ail autonornous authors, of ail Irish writers who
refused to yield to the narrow limits of national realisrn.
Above aIl, the Irish embrace of Dante reveals the extraordinary continu-
ity of the forrnation and unification of world literary space. At a distance
of almost six hundred years, Joyce and Beckett reactualized a founding
text that constituted the first specific calI for emancipation, the first re-
voIt against a dominant order (then represented by Latin). Like du Bellay,
who had also invoked him as the inventor of non-Latin poetical forms,
Joyce and Beckett, finding themselves in a homologous position, made
Dante an instrument of their own liberation. This use-at once literary
and political-of a text essential to the constitution of world literary
space, one that allowed it to corne into existence, attests to the validity of
the genetic model proposed in the present work. Although they sought
a way out from a situation of domination that, despite its historical dif-
ferences, was very similar structurally, Joyce and Beckett completed and
crowned the genesis and ernergence of a world republic of letters: in
coming full circle and rediscovering the inventor of the weapons forged
against Latin oppression, they restored to Dante's work its full subversive
charge by raising it as the standard of their own revolutionary ambitions.
THE JOYCEAN FAMILY

It is commonly said that Finnegans liVclke is a limiting case, calling into
question the very ide a of literature and of readability; and that after
Joyce no one could either take this path or go beyond Ît. This central
(and above all Parisian-which is ta say exclusively formalistic) reading
rnakes an abstraction ofJoyce's historical situation in Ireland and ignores
the fact that, far from being pure and purely formal enterprises, both
Finnegans liVclke and Ulysses, which relied on Dante's model as weil as the
antiuniversalist theories ofVico,6 were nlanifestos and programs for es-
caping astate ofliterary and political dependence. As Beckett showed in
his 1929 essay,Joyce's Work in Progress proposed a sophisticated solution
to the structural dilemrna of writers from dominated terri tories of inter-
nationalliterary space. Writers occupying a homologous position who
grasped the import of Joyce's experiment were later to take this path,

using rnethods of their own, among them Henry Roth in New York
in the 192os, Arno Schmidt in postwar Germany, and, today, Njabulo
Ndebele in South Africa and Salman Rushdie in England and India.
Joyc.e in the Moors of Lunebourg

Arno Schmidt (1914-I979) adopted exactly the same posture during
the postwar years in Germ.any as Joyce had done during the 1920S in
Ireland, both because of the structural similarity of their positions-
SchrrlÏdt in a sense reinvented the same literary revolution-and because
he found in Joyce's work and outlook, albeit belatedly and without ac-
knowledging it, a sort of noble precedent authorizing him to push his
own aesthetic breakthrough still further than Joyce had done.?
Just as Joyce had defined his literary purpose in opposition to Irish
nationalist literature, Schrnidt conceived himself first and forernost in
opposition to Germany and the whole of its inteilectual tradition. An
autodidact who carne late to literature, he had in cornrnon with his con-
ternporaries who founded Gruppe 47 a provocative rrlÏstrust of his na-
tive land. The very things that led Heinrich Boil, Uwe Johnson, and Al-
fred Andersch to place politics at the center of their theoretical and
fictional writing after the war, to inquire into the inteilectual roots of
N azism and the false assumptions of the German Democatic Republic,
led Schmidt by contrast to carry out this same national critique on the
terrain of language, to reject straightforward political discourse and to
propose instead a "literary politics." As against the "renovation" ofliter-
ature advocated by Gruppe 47, which was to be achieved using the
n1ethods of realisln and with the "political" aim of stripping down the
language-on the rrlOdel of Sartre, for the purpose of combating the
Gennanic tradition of aestheticism-Schmidt was practically alone in
undertaking a systematic critique of language and fictional form.
Like Joyce, Schrnidt broke with the conservatism and aestheticisrn
that were characteristic of the national culture of the day, but he was also
in disagreement with the political critique that Gruppe 47 directed
against this culture: "I hereby solemnly protest," he exdaimed, "against
the terrrl 'Gerrnan writer' by which this nation of stupid fools will seek
one day to daim rne as one of their own."8 Like Joyce again, he was to
cast this dual rejection in specificaily literary terrns-the only writer in
Gennany to do so for n1any years. Fascinated by the work of the Irish
novelist, he proposed in 1960 to undertake an annotated translation of
The Revolutionaries 1 33 l
Finnegans Wake, but no publisher would take on the project. Nonethe-
less his familiarity with literature in the English language gave him ac-
cess to European modernity and avant-garde techniques, which in turn
enabled him to avoid the stylistic and narrative constraints of postwar
Gernlan realism.
As brothers in revoIt against language and nationalist hierarchies,
Joyce and Schmidt had much in cornrnon. Like Joyce, Schmidt chose to
contradict the national aesthetic model: against seriousness, he praised
lightness, humor, and farce; against poetry, prose and prosaism-the title
ofhis collection ofstories Rosen und Porree (Roses and Leeks, I959) is by
itself an extraordinary summary of his poetics, devoted to upending
clichés and standing poetry on its head, and in this way, by making con-
crete the faintest and rnost abstract sensations, revitalizing the most triv-
ial descriptions of literature; and against lyricisnl and metaphysics, sar-
casm:
Every writer should grab hold of the nettle of reality, and then show
us aIl of it, the black filthy roots; the poison-green viper stalk; the
gaudy flower(y pot). And as for the critics, those intellectual street-
porters and volunteer firemen, they ought to stop tatting lace nets to
snare poets and produce something "refined" themselves for once:
that would make the world sit up and take roaring notice! Of course,
as with every other grand and beautiful thing, poetry is hedged in by
its complement of geldings; but: the genuine blackamoors are the ones
who rejoice in the sun's black spots! (AlI of this for the reviewers' al-
bum.)9
Just as Joyce in Finnegans Wake had proclaimed an autonomous liter-

ary language, Schmidt fought for a revitalized punctuation and a sinlpli-
fied spelling in German, forcing his typographical innovations upon
publishers and printers: "1 have shown that it is neither a rnatter of sen-
sationalism nor of ostentatious display, but of. . . the further irnprove-
ment, the necessary refinement of the writer's toolS."lO He made the dif-
ference between "two" and "2" the pivot of his expressiveness, and
the subtlety of pauses, according to their increasing order of duration,
the very symbol of his freedom: "If we were not given such freedom,
we'll simply take it! For it's necessary."11 In short, he called for the per-
fecting of a literary language freed from conventions and official norms,
an autonomous tool in the service of writing and the writer. Hence

his decision to quit his publishers once and for aH and to publish his
last works-among them Abend mit Goldrand (Evening Edged in Gold,
197s)-in the fonn of typescripts, aH of whose stages of production he
could personally supervise.
Schrnidt also shared Joyce's disdain for national tradition. In ail his
books he proclaimed his defiance of Goethe, regarded as the greatest of
aH Gennan writers, and his rejection, not of Goethe's poetry, but of
Goethe's prose ("Whereas Goethe daubed aH over the joints with his
arnorphous prose pap ..."; "With Goethe, prose is not an art fonn but a
junk pile") .12While denouncing Goethe's undisputed hegernony over
German letters, he restored "minor" writers-Wieland, Fouqué, Tieck,
Wezel-to the first rank. And above aH he insisted upon his total artistic
independence in the face of national hierarchies that submitted texts to
the judgment of the "people": "Should you receive the applause of the
people," he wrote in Brand 5 Haide (Brand's Heath, 195 I), "ask yourself:
what have l done wrong?! And if your second book is so received as
weH, then cast away your pen: you can never be great . . . Art for the
people?!: leave that slogan to the Nazis and the Communists."13 This po-
sition is identical in almost every respect with that of Joyce when he
protested against what he considered the Abbey Theatre's mistaken em-
phasis on popular drarna: "the artist, though he nuy employ the crowd,
is very carefül to isolate himself ... your popular devil is Inore danger-
ous than your vulgar devil."14
James Joyce and Arno SChInidt did what no one before them had
dared to do: disregarding national taboos and the restrictions these as-
sert, they imposed their own language and grammar together with a
new style of narrative discontinuity-"My life?! is not a continuum,"
Schmidt declared, "(not sirnply fractured into black and white pieces by
day and night! ... ) rnan of a thousand thoughts; of fragmenting catego-
ries ... a tray flIH of glistening snapshots ... that's how rny life runs, how
my memories run (as if sorne spasm-shaken Inan were watching a thun-
derstonn in the night)"-and overturned the hierarchies of national
pantheons. 15 The kinship between Schnudt and Joyce-like the one
that, as we shail see, links Faulkner with Juan Benet, Rachid Boudjedra,
and Mario Vargas Llosa-is not a matter rnerely of historical similarity;
the sirnilarity is also, and especiaily, structural. Occupying the sarne place
in their respective national spaces, they were able to upset the same es-
tablished literary values. Their common defiance of a national language
The Revolutionaries 1 333

ailowed each of them to bring to bear his forrnidable irony, to revitalize
literary language, and to carry out an imrnense literary revolution.
Ulysses in Harlem
Henry Roth (1906-1995), the son of Yiddish-speaking Jewish immi-
grants, discovered Joyce's Ulysses in New York during the 1920S. For a
young man who had grown up in terrible poverty, deprived of alnlost ail
inteilectual and literary resources, in East Harlern, the book was an utter
revelation. He later described in detail in From Bondage} the third of four
volurnes of his autobiographical novel Mercy of a Rude Stream (1994-
1998), how Joyce's book had conle to hirn, almost by chance, through
the intervention of a young wonlan, a professor of literature at the City
Coilege of New York, who had srnuggled back into the country a copy
of the edition published in Paris by Sylvia Beach ("a blue paper-bound
book, an untitled copy ofJames Joyce's Ulysses"). Roth's experience pro-
vides further evidence in support of the account of the structure ofliter·-
ary ·space given here, as weil as of the role of Paris in the nlanufacture
and diffusion of literary nl0dernity. Joyce's book was already farnous in
literary and student circles in New York: "The rare one who had read
the book seemed invested with a veritable luster; he was like one in-
ducted into an esoteric sodality, an ultramodern one. Even to denl0n-
strate falniliarity with the book warranted pretensions to the inteilectual
vanguard."16
Roth understood at once that Joyce's novel could provide him with a
unique me ans for attaining literary rnodernity-for transfonning his
wretched everyday life into literary gold. His enthusiastic pages can only
be read as so nlany testirrlOnies to the "econornic" reality-habituaily
denied-of literary creation:
the Ulysses demonstrated to him not only that it was possible to com-
mute the dross of the mundane and the sordid into literary treasure,
but how it was done. It showed him how to address whole slag heaps
of squalor, and make them available for exploitation in art ... What
was there in the stodgy variety of Dublin city through which Bloom
and Dedalus went to and fro that was so very different from the stodgy
variety ofHarlem's environs, the environs Ira 17 knew so weIl-and the
East Side environments that memory retained like a reserve of impres-
sions? ... HeIl, of nastiness, of sordidness, perversity, and squalor-
compared to anyone in the Ulysses} he had loads, he had droves, he had

troves. But it was language, language, that could magically transmog-
rity the baseness of his days and ways into precious literature-into
the highly touted Ulysses itself . . . The forlorn backyards of tene-
ments, the dreary Felsnaphthamopped hallways, enlivened sometimes
by homely emanations of cabbage ... Speak of the worn lip of the
stoop stairs, the battered brass letter boxes in the foyer, the dilapidated
flight of linoleum-covered steps past the window at the turn of the
landing, and up to the "first floor" ... Didn't it quality for alchemical
transformation ... ? If that was latent wealdl in the domain of letters,
why, he was ri eh beyond compare: his whole world was a junkyard. Ail
those myriad, myriad squalid impressions he took for granted, aIl were
convertible from base to precious, from pig iron to gold ingot. 18
Roth stated ail the literary possibilities that existed in Aluerica at the
time, ail the models that were available to hirn:
No, you didn't have to go cruisin o'er the billows to the South Sea
Isles on a sailing vessel crowded with canvas, or fist a t' gallant, like a
character in The Sea Woij; or prospect for gold in the faraway Klon-
dike, or float down the Mississippi in a raft with Huck Finn, or fight
Indians in the youngWild West nickel magazines ... You didn't need
to go anywhere, anywhere at aIl. It was all here, right here, in Harlem,
on Manhattan Island, anywhere from Harlem to the Jersey City Pier
. . . Language was the conjuror, indeed the philosopher's stone, lan-
guage was a form of alchemy. It was language that elevated meanness to
the heights of art ... What a discovery that was! He, Ira Stigman, was
a mehvin 19 of misery, of the dismal, of the pathetic, the deprived. Ev-
erywhere he looked, whole treasuries were exposed, repositories of
priceless potential ignored, and hence they were his ... It was inde-
cent, but it was literary, and Ira had paid his fee in full for the right to
use it. 2o
Here Roth describes alnlost in its raw state the principle of literary
"transmutation"- a word that, as we have seen, is not carelessly chosen.
His econonUc vocabulary ("treasure," "latent wealth," "gold," "priceless
potential") reveals the actual me chanis ms of littérarisation) stripped of the
usual literary euphernisms, and denlonstrates the practical function of
what 1 have cailed literary heritage, or capital. For it was only on the ba-
sis of his recognition of a structural sinù1arity between his position and
that of a writer from a whoily different linguistic, literary, political, and
historical world, and by relying upon the rnodel that this artist supplied

hirn with, that Roth rnanaged to create his own world for hirnself, to
convert (Roth's own term) his econornic and literary poverty into a
fictional project and, equipped with this passport to rnodernity, to grap-
pIe directly with the most current issues of the literary world. Thus he
wrote, with reference to his first astonished reading ofJoyce's Ulysses:
But as the days passed, and he read and wrestled ... the strange con-
viction took firrner and firmer hold of him, that within himself was
graven a crude analogue of the Joycean model, just as he felt within
himself a hurnble affinity for the Joycean temperament, a diffident ap-
titude for the Joycean method. Opaque though many and many a pas-
sage might be, Ira sensed that he was a me/win of that same kind of
world of which Joyce was an incomparable connoisseur: of that same
kind of pocked and pitted reality. There were keys that evoked that
world, signatures by which they were recognized, and he was ever re-
ceptive to them-why, he couldn't say.21
The novel that Roth wrote after this Joycean revelation, CaU It Sleep
(1934), was to be a failure-perhaps because the gap between his posi-
tion as an author on the far periphery of the world of letters, American
literary space at the time, and the places where certificates of literary
modernity were awarded was too great. Thirty years later Roth's book
was rediscovered and consecrated, and went on to sell more than a mil-
lion copies.
THE FAULKNERIAN REVOLUTION

Williarn Faulkner, no less than Joyce, was responsible for one of the
greatest revolutions in the world ofletters, cornparable in its extent, and
in the depth of the changes it introduced in the novel, to the naturalist
revolution of the late nineteenth century. But while in the centers, and
especially in Paris, the technical innovations of the Arnerican novelist
were understood and valued only as forrnalistic devices, in the outlying
countries of the literary world they were welcomed as tools of libera-
tion. Faulkner's work, nlOre than that of any other writer, henceforth
belonged to the explicit repertoire of international writers in dominated
literary spaces who sought to escape the imposition of national rules, for
he had found a solution to a cornrnonly experienced political, aesthetic,
and literary Îlnpasse.
Though he enjoys a great reputation in the highest circles of the liter-

ary world and ranks arnong the great literary revolutionaries, Faulkner is
also a figure with whorn ail writers in countries on the periphery can
identify-stiil more than Joyce, who has been annexed by critics in the
centers and so thoroughly dehistoricized that deprived writers, bowing
to the monopoly power of the capitals over literary consecration, tend
to overlook the subversive dirnension of his work. In putting an end to
the curse of backwardness that lay over these regions, by offering the
novelists of the poorest countries the possibility of giving acceptable lit-
erary fonn to the rnost repugnant realities of the margins of the world,
Faulkner has been a formidable force for accelerating literary time.
If Faulkner's work has succeeded in linking very different literary en-
terprises, and if its power has been recognized for alrnost half a century
by writers from very different backgrounds, this is surely because it rec-
onciles properties that normaily are thought to be incompatible. As a
citizen of the rnost powerful nation in the world, and as a writer conse--
crated by Paris, Faulkner nonetheless evoked in ail rus books (at least ail
those of his early period) characters, landscapes, ways of thinking, and
stories that exactly coincided with the reality of ail those countries said
to lie in the "South"--a rural and archaic world prey to magical styles of
thought and trapped in the closed life of families and villages. In his
famous preface to the French translation of As l Lay Dying, Valery
Larbaud confirmed·-in order immediately to insist upon the failacy of
this interpretation~that Faulkner's early works had been received in
France as examples of the lowest of ail fictional genres, the roman paysan:
"Here is a novel of rural manners that cornes to us, in a good translation,
from the state of Mississippi ... As l Lay Dying holds certainly more in-
terest and possesses, in my opinion, much higher aesthetic value th an the
great majority of the books anlong which stores arrange it for the con-
venience of their customers, which is to say under the category of 'rural
novels."'22
Faulkner thus helped a primitive and rural world that until then had
seemed to demand a codified and descriptive realism to achieve novelis-
tic modernity: in his hands, a violent, tribal civilization, irnpressed with
the mark ofbiblical mythologies, opposed in every respect to urban mo-
dernity (which was typicaily associated with the stylistic avant-garde),
becarne the privileged object of one of the most daring exercises in style
of the century. Faulkner singlehandedly resolved the contradictions in
which writers from disadvantaged countries found themselves mired,

lifting the curse of imposed literary hierarchies and bringing about a
prodigious reversaI of values.With a single stroke he wiped out the ac-
curnulated backwardness of literatures that hitherto had been excluded
from the literary present, which is to say from stylistic modernity. The
Spanish writer Juan Benet was indisputably one of the first to have un-
derstood this; but after hirn aIl writers from the South, in the broad sense
of the terIT1, from the West lndies to Portugal and from South Arnerica
to Africa, recognized that Faulkner had revealed to thern a way of attain-
ing the Greenwich meridian without in the least denying their cultural
heritage. The kinship that irnmediately disclosed itself to eccentric writ-
ers, despite differences of language, period, and civilization, allowed hirn
to be claimed as a legitimate ancestor. Moreover, it is clear that the
mechanism of identification was the same in the case both ofJoyce and
of Faulkner. Their work, so far as it resolved in an utterly new and rnas-
terly fashion the dilernma and difficulties of deprived writers, could be
appreciated only by writers who were placed in a honl010gous position:
whereas Joyce is typically, and unsurprisingly, honored by novelists from
disadvantaged urban backgrounds, Faulkner is recognized by authors
from rural countries with archaic cultural structures.
Faulkner in Leon
"William Faulkner was my reason for becorning a writer," Juan Benet
once said. "He was the greatest influence of rny entire life."23 The debt
to Faulkner acknowledged by Benet, the direct line of descent he recog-
nized between his own work and that of the American novelist, the ab-
solute admiration that he reserved for a writer whom he looked up to as
a master before aIl others are an extraordinary illustration of the conl-
plexity of the circula tory network ofliterature. This elective affinity, or-
dinarily described using the language of "influence," was in no way the
product of a preordained nleeting in SOlne heavenly realnl of ideas. 24
By the time they reached Benet in Spain in the 1950S, Faulkner's nov-
els had traveled a very long way in tirne and space. They took twenty
years to rnake the trip fronl Mississippi to Madrid, by a route that owed
nothing to chance, for they had go ne through Paris. Benet read Faulkner
in French translation-not, he later confirmed, out of any special fasci-
nation with France or its language, but because at this time speaking and
reading French assured access to the literature of the whole world. And
he discovered literary rnodernity not because he had any particular in-

terest in the Arnerican or English novel, but because Faulkner had long
been regarded by the highest cri tic al authorities in France as one of the
founders of the modern novel. The eminent position occupied by Paris
in the world ofletters rneant that Benet could not help but place rus full
confidence in the French endorsement of Faulkner, and he approached
Faulkner as a great writer whose enduring reputation was secure. But
the sense of revelation he felt on encountering Faulkner's work (rather
th an that of any other author) was plainly connected with the striking
coincidence between two worlds that apparently had nothing in corn-
rnon, the South of the United States described by Faulkner and the
Spanish province of Leon, where Benet was working at the time. Look-
ing back upon his early career as an engineer and a writer, Benet re-
called: "1 was in a region that 1 knew very little: the northwest of Spain,
south of the Cantabrian Mountains, in Leon. It was a very backward re-
gion at the time, with very few people-there was nothing, no roads,
no electricity, everything had to be done. 1 traveled a great deal [at
this time] in the poorest and most remote regions of Spain."25 Valery
Larbaud, in his preface to the French version of As l Lay Dying, had ear-
lier described Faulkner's American landscape in almost the same terms:
"The reader will not fail to be struck by the purely agricultural charac-
ter of these vast areas, the absence oflarge cities, the underdeveloped sys--
tem of roads and communications, and the sparse population of farmers
who work their own land, whose life seerns much more difficult than
that of the nlajority of rural folk, freehold and tenant farmers alike, in
central and eastern Europe."26
The worn notion of "influence" is plainly both too simple and too
vague to be of any use in trying to account for the affinity Benet felt for
Faulkner. Far from dissimulating, or remaining silent about what he
owed to Faulkner-unlike the rnajority of "influenced" writers, who
insist above aIl upon the originality of their inspiration-Benet openly
acknowledged his filiation and constantly ernphasized, by way of ex-
plicit hornage, the many parallels between their work. 27 He proclaimed
his indebtedness as though he wished to understand better the nature of
his borrowings: to describe a homologous reality, he employed in a
functional (and not orùy, for exarnple, an aesthetic) way elements that by
definition were sinùlar. The recognition of a kinship between the two
worlds implies in practice the reproduction of stylistic and structural
elements, exclu ding any straightforward imitation of literary "pro ce-

dures." Attention has, of course, been called to the tact that Benet situ-
ated all his novels in a region called "Region," just as Faulkner had cir-
cumscribed the action of his books within Yoknapatawpha County-
both authors also provided precise topographical rnaps for their fictive
regions, Faulkner for the Portable Faulkner (1946) edited by Malcolrn
Cowley and Benet in Herrumbrosas Lanzas (1983)-to say nothing of
similarities with respect to narrative complexity, temporal nonlinearity,
chronological disruptions, and so on. Maurice-Edgar Coindreau, reject-
ing the particularist interpretation that associated Faulkner's work solely
with the American South, insisted in his preface to the French edition
of The Wild Palms (1939) that "Faulkner's true domain is that of eternal
rnyths, especially those that the Bible has popularized" and went on to
describe Faulkner as a "great primitive, servant of the old luyths."28
Benet likewise appealed to myth, but in order to evoke an altogether
different cultural context. In all his novels he mixed myths with popular
beliefs, superstitions, and ancestral customs, as though his intention was
to conduct a sort of ethnological inquiry. In drawing upon ancient
myths, if only in an imprecise and allusive way, he ennobled and univer-
salized the structures of thought of isolated peasants in the Cantabrian
Mountains: the menacing and labyrinthine peaks that loom over the
opening of Volverâs a Region (Return to Region, 1967), watched over by
a ghostly and omnipresent guardian, subtly evoke all Hades and alliaby-
rinthine hells, the strange birds of the region ("beautiful, black, hungry,
and silent") that attack human beings by plunging a terrible and sudden
barb into their back, calling to mind the guardians of sonle infernal cir-
cle. 29 In laying emphasis on the interaction ofbeliefs, fears, and legends,
Benet developed a long and complex line of thought concerning the ar-
chaism and underdevelopment of his country, doomed to endure ob-
scure cornbats for antiquated prizes: "and there, in a ditch ... died the
nun who, by mobilizing an entire army, had attempted, with the pretext
of an old affront, to violate the inaccessibility of that mountain and
bring to light the secret that its backwardness holds."30 Benet's recourse
to magical thought was not at all a matter ofidealizing the rural world as
a repository of the purest traces of a national culture; to the contral)',
through a curious reflectiveness, no doubt made possible by the action
of a Faulknerian sort of recollection, it underlay his political and histori-
cal inquiry into Spanish backwardness and resistance to change.
The freedom Benet discovered from reading Faulkner permitted him

to frame questions pertinent to Spanish experience. It is in this sense
that ail his analyses rnust be understood: despite their apparently enig-
matic (and therefore strictly literary) quality, they are unquestionably
historical and ethnographic, aimed at deciphering archaic national
structures. Thus he evoked the "head of King Sidonio-as legend
teils-leaping over the swirling waters of the Torce ... and the madness
of young Aviza, opening the insides of his father's corpse ... [which
wiil] shape forever the behavior of a dispossessed and degraded people
driven toward decadence and backwardness in order to preserve its le-
gitirnate authority."31 In the same way Benet adopted a resolutely pro-
vocative point of view with regard to the Spanish civil war. There is no
trace in his writings of the heroic rnythology that furnished the point of
departure for so rnany works by Republican exiles. In his first book (and
subsequently in alrnost ail his novels in one form or another) Benet di-
rectly addressed the question of the war-the most taboo subject of ail,
the source of ail political stances in the Spanish inteilectual world of the
1950S and 1960s. The utterly new perspective that he brought to bear
upon the war was that of a historian; his tone was clinical, descriptive,
impartial, refilsing to endorse the cause of either republicans or nation-
alists, ail of whom seemed to him to display the same reckless beilicosity.
Benet's disillusionment (no doubt rooted in personal experience-his
father, a republican, had been executed in Madrid by the republican
arrny) could only lead to a total rupture with literary conventions. Thus
he plainly announced his purpose in Return to Region: "The whole
course of the civil war in the Regi6n sector begins to be clearly seen
wh en one understands that, in more than one aspect, it is a paradigm on
a lesser scale and with a slower rhythm than peninsular-wide events." A
few lines later, describing the republican campaign in Regi6n, he writes:
"It was republican by negligence or omission, revolutionary by sound,
and beilicose not out of any spirit of revenge for an age-old oppressive
order, but out of the anger and candor born of a natural ominous and
tedious condition."32 In describing the civil war as one of the innumera-
ble avatars of Spanish underdevelopment,33 as one of the rnost terrible
consequences of an isolation that had deliberately been imposed upon a
country subject to the most archaic practices and beliefs, Benet drew at-
tention in this book, published while Franco was still in power, to the
historicallogic of the advent of a dictatorship. Thus he observed in con-
nection with Numa, guardian of the accursed mountain ofRegi6n: "He
The Revolutionaries 1 34 I
gives up nothing, but, at least, he doesn't allow the slightest progress; he
doesn't squeeze, he slTIothers. Don't look for a superstition in hirn; he's
not a whim of nature or the result of a civil war; perhaps the whole or-
ganized process of a religion,joined to the growth of poverty, necessarily
produces such a creature: a cowardly, selfish, and coarse people always
prefers suppression to doubt; the latter, it rnight be said, is a privilege of
the rich."34
Faulkner in Aigeria
Rachid Boudjedra, who attempted to do the same sort of thing in
Arabie as Juan Benet had do ne with respect to Spanish language and
culture, also sought to lTIake use of the Faulknerian heritage in order to
recast the national questions facing the Algerian novel and to find an al-
ternative to the unsatisfactory choice between writing in French or
Arabie. He therefore looked to a fictional modernity that the educa-
tio-?al tradition of his country, shaped by colonization, had not allowed
to develop there:
I want my country to be modern, and for the moment it isn't; and in

my writing, actually, I am fascinated by the modernity of writing,
by writers whom I consider to be making modernity in the world,
whether they are contemporary or avant-garde writers: Faulkner, even
ifhe has long been dead, because he invented fictional modernity; and
Claude Simon. AlI of Claude Simon's novels take place in and around
Perpignan. The whole world of his books unfolds in this small city
and the small village [outside it]. And in the same way Faulkner also
set all his stories in Jefferson, a tiny town in Mississippi. And so 1 find
myself there, and I call this the Southern novel and I am part of this
Southern novel, I want to be part of it. It's the South that makes me
feel close to Claude Simon because he spoke of the women of the
1930S [in Perpignan] exactlyas I speak of the women of the 1990S in
Algeria today: the confinement, the heat ... All that is the same world
as my own, the world in which I was born. Faulkner is the same thing,
the South, the mosquitoes, all that. 35
Boudjedra's reference to Claude Simon, who also acknowledged his in-

debtedness to Faulkner, is further evidence of a wide-ranging appropri-
ation of the American heritage. Moreover, the avowal of a fictional mo--
dernity that supplies the rneans for expressing the reality of a country
without using the outmoded devices of naturalism implies the affirma-

tion oftotalliterary and aesthetic autonorrly: Boudjedra rejected the po-
litical co-optation of Algerian writers and instead sought to join batde
with politics on another terrain, that of literature. This effort, it should
be emphasized, did not arnount to retreat into an apolitical aestheticism.
Undermining the literary norms of the Arabic language and the tradi-
tional respect for a language associated with religion and sociallife pro-
foundly revitalized literary practices in Algeria. Boudjedra employed the
weapons of writers in the center in order to subvert social and religious
proprieties (surely no less difficult to do in Algeria today than it was in
Ireland in the 1920S) and to transform frorn within the practices of a lit-
erature that believed itself to be liberated fr0111 colonial constraints by
the general adoption of a narrative rrlOdel that, in fact, only reproduced
the French academic tradition of belle écriture: "Ours is a literature of
teachers, a pedagogicalliterature ... the Algerian writer sees things in an
objective, external, sociological, anthropological way. It rnust also be said
that colonization was a great help to hirrl and even confined hirn within
[this perspective] and applauded his efforts ... And in this literature
of teachers there is a desire to teach, a desire to instruct." To Boudjedra's
rnind, the problem was "above ail one of questioning sacredness, what is
considered by a people, rightly or wrongly, to be sacred ... it is necessary
to talk in Arabic about things that haven't been talked about. Sexuality,
for instance." The appearance of the Arabic translation of Sunstroke, his
second novel published in France, was "an enorrrlOUS scandaI at the time
in Algeria," he recailed, "precisely because l'd chailenged the sacred
text-I'd made puns on the Koranic text just as we did as children, as
every Algerian, Arab, Muslirrl child does in primary school. The whole
subversive side, the whole subversive thrust cornes through better in
Arabic ... 1 subvert the language; this is important for us, that we sub.-
vert the language, because it's so sacralized, so strictly channeled, it's
good to subvert it."36
Sorne fifteen years earlier Boudjedra's countryman Kateb Yacine had
expressed hirnself in rather similar terrrls while seeking to qualify the
tendency of critics to view Faulkner as his sole model and to explain
Faulkner's irnportance for hirn in tenns of the sirrlilarities between the
Arrlerican South and Algeria:
Let's take the exampIe of Camus. He was aIso a writer, undeniably, but
his books on Algeria ring faIse and hollow ... As for Faulkner, he rep-

resents the type of man 1 de test most of aIl. He was a colonist, a white
Puritan, a product of the United States ... Only Faulkner was bril-
liant. He was a slave to literature ... He couldn't not have influenced
me, especially since Algeria was a sort of Southern America, a South
of the United States, at the moment when 1 was writing, with its siz-
able minority of whites and a host of very similar problems. And so
there is a reason for the fascination with Faulkner. But the way in
which Faulkner's influence has been described is misleading. Natu-
rally publishers put that sort of thing on the book cover.Which is fine,
because Faulkner is very weIl known. It's convenient-but it has to be
explained, Faulkner's influence. If one explains it in a few words, as 1
have just done, things are put back in perspective. 37
Faulkner in Latin America

The Alnerican novelist also becanle the standard-bearer of the literary
liberation of the writers of the Latin American "boom."We know that
his _work was essential for Gabriel Garda Marquez, who has repeatedly
testified to this. But it was also essential for Mario Vargas Llosa, who has
insisted on the itnportance of Faulkner's writing for writers of his gen-
eration:
1 read the American novelists, especially those of the "lost genera-
tion"--Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos--above aIl
Faulkner. Of the authors 1 read in my youth, he is one of the few who
still remains a living presence for me. 1 have never been disappointed
rereading Faulkner, as 1 have sometimes been with Hemingway, for
example ... [Faulkner] was the first novelist whom 1 wanted to study
closely, to reconstruct rationally, trying to see how time was organized
in his novels, for example, how the planes of space and chronology in-
tersected, [to see] its jumps, its ability to tell a story from various con-
trary perspectives so as to create an ambiguity, an enigma, a sense of
mystery and depth. Faulkner's technique dazzled me, apart from the
fact that he is one of the great novelists of the twentieth century. 1 be-
lieve that, for a Latin American writer, reading his books at the time 1
did was very useflil, because they provided a valuable set of techniques
for describing a reality that, in a certain sense, had a great deal in com-
mon with Faulkner's reality, that of the South of the United States. 38
The "geopolitical" kinship emphasized by Vargas Llosa is the very same

one detected by Benet and Boudjedra, proof of a structural affinity that
does not nuke Faulkner the object of a vague admiration for one of the

rnost eminent rnernbers of the pantheon of fictional rnodernity, but the
precursor and inventor of a specific-narrative, technical, fonnal-solu-
tion that rnade it possible to reconcile the rnost rnodern aesthetics with
the most archaic social structures and landscapes. 39
TOWARD THE INVENTION OF LlTERARY LANGUAGES

In the course of a long history that led writers frorn a condition of de-
pendence to one of at least relative independence, a slow process of ac-
cumulating resources that led to the graduaI invention of literary free-
dom and specificity, the rnost uncertain and most difficult struggle (and
also the one rnost rarely encountered) has been over language. Because
it is at once a political instrument, a national standard, and a writer's raw
rnaterial, language is always liable-by virtue of this very ambiguity-to
be used as a means for achieving national ends, whether nationalist
or populist or both. The inescapable dependence upon political and
national authorities explains why the only admission of mernbership
and dependence that writers in the most autonomous territories of
the world republic of letters can permit themselves alrnost invariably
takes the form, regardless of their homeland, of the universally adopted
watchword "My country is my language"-an explicit and economical
way of repudiating political nationalism (banished from the most inde-
pendent countries) while at the same time pledging allegiance to a
tongue that is tied to the nation.
This is why the ultimate step in the liberation of writing and writers,
their final proclamation of independence, consists in affirming the au-
tonornous use of a purely literary language, one that submits to none of
the laws of grammatical or even orthographie correctness (which, of
course, are imposed by states) and that refuses to yield to the usual re-
quirements of intelligibility associated with the most elementary forms
of communication, remaining loyal orùy to the conditions dictated by
literary creation itself.
Joyce was the first, in Finnegans Wake, to break with the imperatives of
linear narrative, immediate readability, and grammaticality, and to herald
with this multilingual work the advent and use of a specifically literary
language. Arno Schmidt followed him along this path, changing the
nature of narrative through typographical alterations, notably in Abend
mit Goldrand, in which several narrations are found on the same page.
Katalin Molnar, a Hungarian writer living and working in France, re-

cently took yet another step with an attack on the French language that
explicitly challenged the national-which is to say political-assurnp-
tions on which subrnission to a linguistic order rests. 40 In the passage
that serves as an epigraph to this chapter, she uses a phonetic language-
that is, one that is the same in both written and spoken form--both
ironically and subversively to argue that literary language rnust enjoy
complete autonomy.41
Surely no writer up until the present day has gone further in the in-
vention of a literary language th an Samuel Beckett, whose texts are
among the most autonomous ever imagined. His position as an Irish
writer exiled in Paris, together with the bilingual character of his work
(self-translated in both directions), proved to be an unsurpassably ef-
ficient engine for challenging accepted linguistic and narrative practices.
His increasingly rigorous and precise quest for a radical autonomy led
hitn to break with aIl the forms of national dependence peculiar to writ-
ers:. the nation in the political sense, of course, but to a still greater
degree the debates concerning national literary history, the aesthetic
choices dictated by national literary space, and finally language itself,
conceived as a set of laws and rules imposed by political authorities that
work to subject writers to the national norms of the national language.
It is in this sense that Beckett's passionate interest in the painting of
Bram van Velde is to be understood: turning away from the figurative
conventions of his own art, he looked to abstract painting. By transpos-
ing one of the great revolutions in painting to literature he succeeded in
upsetting its usual assumptions. Little by little, but ever rnore radically in
extending Joyce's effort to underrnine the edifice of realism, Beckett
challenged aIl the illusions of reality on which fictional narration rests.
Rejecting first the assumption of spatial and temporal verisirnilitude,
then of characters and even first names, he labored to invent a pure and
autonornous literature freed from the rules of traditional representation.
This emancipation required a novel use of language, liberated frorn the
ordinary constraints of plain readability.
To achieve this unprecedented degree of abstraction, Beckett had to
invent an utterly new set of technical tools that made it possible to es-
cape meaning-which is to say narration, representation, succession, de-
scription, setting, even character-without thereby resigning himself to
inarticulateness. In short, he had to create an autonomous literary lan-
guage, or at least the most autonomous language ever imagined by a

writer. To silence meaning as far as possible, in order to attain literary
autonorny-this was Beckett's wager, one of the maddest and most am-
bitious in the history of literature. The result of this magisterial attempt
to create an absolutely self-sufficient writing was Worstward Ho (1983)-
posthumously translated into French as Cap au pire (I99I)-which gen-
erated its own syntax and vocabulary, decreed its own grammar, even
created words answering solely to the logic of the pure space of a text
whose very possibility was due to itself alone. It is perhaps in this respect
that Beckett finally attained totalliterary abstraction, having managed to
create a pure object of language, totally autonomous since it refers to
nothing other than itself.
In order to rescue literature from its final form of dependence, then,
Beckett broke with the very idea of a conUIlon language. Having set off
in search of a literature of the "non-word,"42 he created the most inde-
pendent world conceivable-a literature delivered from verbal meaning
itself. Beckett wrote in neither French nor English. He manufactured a
unique aesthetic material solely on the basis ofhis own aesthetic princi-
pIes, thus perhaps managing to bring about, in the most total incompre-
hension, the first truly autonornous literary revolution.

CONCLUSION 1 The World and the Literary Trousers
Customer: God made the world in six days and Vou, Vou couldn't be bothered to make me a
pair of trousers in six months.
Tai/or: But sir, look at the world, and look at your trousers.
-Samuel Beckett, The World and the Trousers
BECKETT, ALTHOUGH HE sought to tear himself away from traditional con-

ceptions of a literature that,like Kafka, he thought was literally impossi-
ble, worked very briefly at the end of the war as an art critic. Seeking
to describe and make known the work of the van Velde brothers, he
reviewed aIl the possibilities available to the critic: "Let us not speak
of criticism proper. The best criticism-by men su ch as Fromentin,
Grohmann, MacGreevy, Sauerlandt-is that of Ami el ... Otherwise one
does general aesthetics, like Lessing. This is a charming game. Or one
deals in anecdotes, like Vasari and Harper's Magazine. Or one puts to-
gether catalogues raisonnés, like Smith. Or one frankly devotes oneself
to a disagreeable and confused chatter."l
What, then, is left for the critic to do? Perhaps just this: to restore the
lost relationship between the world and the trousers ofliterature, to pa-
tiently retie the threads that link these two universes, which otherwise
are condernned to exist in parallei without ever meeting each other. Lit-
erary theory has long renounced history by pretending that it is nec es-
sary to choose between the two, which it holds to be mutually exclu-
sive-indeed Roland Barthes wrote an essay on this question titled
"History or Literature"2-and that to do literary history arnounts to re·-
nouncing the text, which is to say literature itself. The author as excep-
tion and the text as unattainable infinite have been declared consub-
stantial with the very definition of literary activity. This in turn has led
to their exclusion or expulsion-to use the language of the church, their
definitive excornrnunication-frorn history, which stands accused ofbe-
ing incapable of rising high enough in the heaven of the pure forms of
literary art.
The two universes-the "world" and "literature"-were thus de-
clared incommensurable. Barthes spoke of two continents: "On the one
hand the world, with its profusion of facts, political, social, economic,
ideological; and on the other the work, apparently solitary, always am-
biguous, since it lends itself to several meanings at the same time ... Frorn
one continent to the other a few signaIs are exchanged, a few conni-
vances underscored. But for the most part the study of each of these two
continents proceeds in an autonomous fashion: the two geographies sel-
dorn coincide."3
The obstacle, usuaily thought to be insurmountable, to establishing a
link between these two universes is the one mentioned by Barthes,
namely, geography. But it is above ail tirne. Theorists and historians of
literature maintain that literary forms do not change with the sarrle
rhythm; they are subject to "another temporality," as Marc FUluaroli cails
it, that is irreducible to the chronology of the ordinary world. 4 But in
fact it appears possible to stand the question of what Antoine Corrl-
pagnon has cailed "differential chronology" on its head,5 and to describe
instead the ways in which literary time cornes into existence, which is to
say a world that is structured according to its own laws, its specifie geog-
raphy and chronology. This world is quite separate from the ordinary
world, but it is only relatively autonomous, only relatively independent of
it-which is to say, by the same token, relatively dependent upon it. In a
sense, Barthes's dream has been realized: "The dream, obviously, is that
these two continents have complementary fonns; that, distant [though
they are from each other] on the map, they can nonetheless, through an
ideal translation, be brought together, be interlocked with each other,
rather as Wegener rejoined Africa and America."6
But how are we to conceive a history of everything that, in Beckett's
words, "moves, swirns, flies away, cornes back, unn1akes and remakes it-
self ... [of] these shifting planes, these shimmering contours, these equi-
Conclusion 1 349
libria that the least disturbance disrupts, that break apart and come back
together again if one looks long enough? How are we to speak ... of
this world without weight, without force, without shadow? . . . This is
what literature is." Moreover, he goes on to ask, how are we to represent
change-not only specific changes in literary forrrls, genres, and styles
but also literary ruptures and revolutions? Above ail, how are we to un-
derstand the rnost distinctive works in time) without either denying or
diminishing their singularity, when art "is waiting to be gotten out of
there"-to be rescued from time?7
Making Barthes's drearn come true assumes an inversion of the ordi-
nary view of literature and, through a sort of Husserlian epochë) a rno-
mentary suspension of the belief that attaches to it. To go against com-
mon sense by making literature a ternporal object is not to reduce it to a
series of worldly events, causing individual works to depend on ordinary
historical chronology; to the contrary, it causes them to enter into a dual
tem.porality. Writing the history ofliterature is a paradoxical activity that
consists in placing it in historical time and then showing how literature
gradually tears itself away frorrl this temporality, creating in turn its own
temporality, one that has gone unperceived until the present day. It is
true that there is a temporal irrlbalance between the world and literature,
but it is literary tirrle that allows literature to free itself from political
time. In other words, the elaboration of a properly literary temporality is
the condition of being able to create a literary history of literature (by
contrast with-and by reference to--what Lucien Febvre called the
"historical history ofliterature").8 Hence the necessity of reestablishing
the original historical bond between literature and the world-a bond
that, as we have seen, is primarily political and national in nature-in or-
der to show how literature subsequently managed, through a graduaI ac-
quisition of autonomy, to escape the ordinary laws of history. By the
same token,literature may be defined-without contradiction-both as
an object that is irreducible to history and as a historical object, albeit
one that enjoys a strictly literary historicity. What 1 have called the
genesis of literary space is this very process by which literary freedom
is invented, slowly, painfully, and with great difficulty, through endless
struggles and rivalries, and against aIl the extrinsic limitations-political,
national, linguistic, commercial, diplomatic-that are irnposed upon it.
To account fully for this invisible and secret Ineasure of time, it is
therefore necessary to show how the ernergence of literary tirrle led to

the creation of a literary space endowed with its own laws. This space
may be said to be "inter-national" in the sense that it has been con-
structed and unified by means of struggles and rivalries arnong national
spaces-to the point that today it covers the entire world. The structure
of world space, what Barthes called "geography," is itself a function of
time: each nationalliterary space (and therefore each writer) is situated
not spatially but temporally. There is a time specific to literature, rnea-
sured with reference to what 1 have called the literary Greenwich me-
ridian, in terms of which it bec ornes possible to draw an aesthetic map
of the world, the position of each national space being deterrnined by its
temporal distance from the center.
The simple pattern of inequality that structures this space has the irn-
rnediate consequence of rendering obsolete the rnost common repre-
sentations of the writer as a pure being, standing outside history and
without ties to the world: everything that is divine, Barthes used to say, is
light. If it is true that this literary world has been constituted as a sort of
parallel reality, then every writer is ineluctably situated in this space:
"And not only does everyone have this feeling that we occupy a place in
Time," Proust wrote at the end of À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search
ofLost Time, I9I3-I927), "but this 'place' is something that the sirnplest
arnong us habitually measures in an approximate fashion, as he rnight
measure with his eye the place which we occupy in space."9 Indeed, the
writer is twice situated in literary space-time: once according to the po-
sition of the nationalliterary space from which he cornes, and once ac-
cording to the place that he occupies within this national space.
ln other words, in proposing to describe the world republic ofletters,
which is to say the genesis and structure of internationalliterary space, 1
have tried not only to lay the foundations for a true literary history, but
also to give the principles of a new method for interpreting literary
texts. Whence the enormous difficulty of the enterprise: by its very na-
ture it requires the critic to continually shift perspective, to change
lenses, as it were-one mornent looking to clarify a view of the whole
by what rnight seem to be an insignificant detail, the next to explicating
the most particular aspect of a work by taking a de tour through what
rnight appear to be observations of the most general sort. In this prob-
lem 1 thought 1 recognized the one evoked by Proust when he recalled
in the final volume of À la Recherche the rnisunderstandings encountered
during his first attempts to convey the purpose ofhis work as a whole:
Conclusion 1 35 1
Before long 1 was able to show a few sketches. No one understood
anything of them. Even those who commended my perception of the
truths which 1 wanted eventually to engrave within the temple, con-
gratulated me on having discovered them "with a microscope," when
on the contrary it was a telescope that 1 had used to observe things
which were indeed very small to the naked eye, but only because they
were situated at a great distance, and which were each one of them in
itself a world. Those passages in which 1 was trying to arrive at general
laws were described as so much pedantic investigation of detail. lO
This constant passing back and forth between that which is nearest and
that which is farthest away, between the microscopic and the macro-
scopic, between the individual writer and the vast literary world, de-
mands a new herrneneutic logic, at once specific-since it seeks to ac-
count for a text in its very singularity and literariness-and historical. To
read a text in a way that is inseparably literary and historical, then, is to
rest9re it to its own distinctive time; to situate it in its own world, with
reference only to the literary Greenwich meridian.
But tiITle, the sole source ofliterary value (converted into antiquity, into
credit, resources, and literariness), is also the source of the inequality of
the literary world. A genuinely literary history ofliterature can be writ-
ten only by taking into account the unequal status of the players in the
literary game and the specific mechanisIT1S of domination that are n1ani-
fested in it. The oldest literary spaces are also the most endowed, which
is to say that they exert an uncontested dominion over the whole of the
literary world. The idea of a pure literature, freed from history, is a his-
torical invention that, on account of the distance that separates the old-
est spaces from the ones that have nlost recently entered the literary
world, has been universally imposed throughout the world ofletters.
The denial of history and, above ail, the denial of the unequal struc-
ture of literary space prevent an understanding-and an acceptance-of
national, political, and popular categories as constitutive ofless endowed
literary spaces, thereby making it impossible to grasp the purpose of
rnany enterprises from the suburbs of literary space, even (as in the case
of Kafka) to recognize them as such. "Pure" criticism, in the fuilness of
its ignorance, projects its own aesthetic categories upon texts whose his-
tory is much rnore conlplex than it is wiiling to acknowledge. At the
pole of pure literature, national and political categories are not only ig-

nored; they are excluded frorn the very definition of literature. In other
words, in those lands where the most ancient resources have perrnitted
literature to emancipate itself (or nearly so) from ail forms of external
dependence, a remorseless ethnocentrisrn causes the formidable ruerar-·
chical structure of the literary world-the de facto inequality of its par-
ticipants-to be rejected. Political dependence, internaI translations, na-
tional and linguistic concerns, the necessity of constituting a patrimony
in order to enter into literary time--ail these things that constrain the
purpose and the form ofliterary works from the margins of the republic
of letters are at once denied and disregarded by those who lay down its
laws in the center. This is why eccentric works are either dismissed out
ofhand as nonliterary, which is to say inconsistent with the pure criteria
of pure literature, or, less often, consecrated at the price of irnrnense mis-
understandings that are elevated to the status of principles of literary
recognition. Thus the denial of hierarchical structure, of rivalry, of the
inequality of literary spaces transforrns the haughty regard of ethno-
centric ignorance into either universalizing consecration or wholesale
excommunication.
The example of Kafka shows that for the most part this ethno-
centrism takes the form of anachronism. Since his fame was entirely
posthumous, these anachronisms had to do with the distance that sepa-
rated the literary (and political and inteilectual) space in which he pro-
duced his texts from the corresponding space in which his work was re-
ceived. With Kafka's entrance into the internationalliterary world that
anointed him after 1945 as one of the founders ofliterary modernity, the
criteria that were then current at the literary Greenwich meridian-the
criteria of the literary present, reactualized by each generation in appro-
priating texts for its own use: autonomy, forrnalism, polysenly, moder-
nity, and so on-were applied to his work. Kafka thereby lost ail of his
national and cultural characteristics, now obscured by the process of
universalization. By historicizing his position and purpose, however, it
becomes possible to show that he was in fact a writer from a dominated
country, that he believed himself to be one, and that he lived as though
he was one. Given this much, it may reasonably be concluded on the ba-
sis of the model that has been developed in these pages that his writing
was devoted to the ceaseless investigation of a problematic identity. He
took part in the constitution of a nationalliterature, seeking to contrib-
ute through his writing to the emancipation of rus people and to hasten
Conclusion 1 353
its accession to nationality. No rnatter that Kafka was a writer frorn a
srnall country, he was completely opposed to literary formalisrn; and it
was with full knowledge and awareness of his predicarnent that he em-
barked upon the collective and communitarian path. Yet the existence
ofliterary hierarchies imposed by the critical ethnocentrisrn of the great
literary nations prevented this type ofliterary enterprise from being rec-
ognized as worthy of the highest conception ofliterature.
Gnly the international and historical model that has been proposed
here, and quite particularly an appreciation of the historicallink estab-
lished since the sixteenth century between literature and the nation, can
give the literary projects of writers on the periphery their justification
and their aesthetic and political coherence. By drawing up a map of the
literary world and highlighting thG gap between great and smallliterary
nations, one Inay hope to be delivered at la st from the prejudices incul-
cated by literary critics in the center. By accepting that Kafka, for exam-
pIe, possessed the traits proper and cornrnon to writers from emerging
and dorninated nations, it becomes possible to free oneself from the in-
herent blindnesses of the consecrating authorities. The sarne mechanism
by which political and historical specificity is denied can be seen at
work in authors as various as Ibsen, Yacine, Joyce, Beckett, and Benet:
though they traveled very different paths, each of them owed his univer-
sal recognition to a huge rnisunderstanding of what he was trying to do.
Each of their careers poses, in an exemplary way, the question of how
literary universality is manufactured. 11
1 do not mean, of course, to contest Katka's universal consecration.
His extraordinary investigations, combined with his untenable position,
no doubt obliged him to invent a literature that, through the subversion
of the ordinary codes of literary representation and, above ail, the ques-
tioning of Jewish identity as a social destiny, raised a universal kind of
questioning to its point of highest intensity. But the deliberate dehis-
toricization practiced by critics in the center favored a univeralization
that rests on an equally deliberate and obvious ignorance. This is why
the application of a new method for interpreting literary texts, founded
on a fresh conception of literary history, is an indispensable tool in the
constitution of a new literary universality. For it is only on the condition
of understanding the extreme particularism of a literary project that one
can go on to state the true principle of its universal appeal.
My hope is that the present work may become a sort of critical

weapon in the service of all deprived and dorninated writers on the pe-
riphery of the literary world. 1 hope that my reading of the texts of du
Bellay, Kafka,]oyce, and Faulkner rnay serve as an instrurnent for strug-
gling against the presurnptions, the arrogance, and the fiats of critics in
the center, who ignore the basic fact of the inequality of access to liter-
ary existence. There is a kind of universality that escapes the centers: the
universal domination of writers that, though-historically it has taken dif-
ferent forms, has nonetheless managed to pro duce the same effects ev-
erywhere in the world over the last four hundred years. The incredible
constancy-I rnyself was amazed to discover it-of the literary struggles,
prodarnations, and manifestos that lead fronl du Bellay to Kateb Yacine,
via Yeats, Ki?; and Beckett, ought in the future to encourage "latecom-
ers" to the world of letters to daim as their ancestors sorne of the most
prestigious writers in literary history and, above all, to find in the work
of these writers the justification for their own work, with regard not
only to the fonns they adopt but also to the language they use and the
political and national perspectives they express.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that ever since 1549, the date
of the first printed edition of The Dcjènse and fllustration of the French
Language) the greatest revolutions have been fomented by eccentric writ-
ers. The revolutions brought about by authors su ch as Rubén Dario,
Georg Brandes, Mario de Andrade,]ames Joyce, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beck-
ett, and William Faulkner helped to profoundly alter current literary
practices and to change the very Ineasure of tirne and literary modernity.
Because this book has been com_posed for-and even through-its read-
ers, 1 hope 1 rnay be forgiven for quoting Proust once rrlOre in dosing, us-
ing the same words that he used at the end of In Sem'ch of Lost Time:
1 thought [more modestly] of my book and it would be inaccurate

even to say that 1 thought of those who would read it as "rny" readers.
For it seemed to me that they would not be "my" readers but the
readers of their own selves, my book being merely a sort of magnify-
ing glass like those that the optician at Combray used to offer his cus-
torners-it would be my book, but with its help 1 would furnish them
with the means of reading what lay inside thernselves. So that 1 should
not ask them to praise me or to censure me, but simply to tell me
wh ether "it is really like that," 1 should ask thern whether the words
that they read within thernselves are the sarne as those which 1 have
wrÏtten. 12
Conclusion 1 355
Notes
Introduction
1. Henry James, The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories) ed. Frank Kermode
(New York: Penguin, I986), 368.
2. Ibid., 364, 368, 366-367, 368.
3· Ibid., 366, 374, 3 81 , 367·
4. Ferdinand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism: 15th-18th Century) vol. 3: The
Perspective of the vv<:>rld) trans. Siân Reynolds (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1992), 19.
5. Ibid., 18-19, I7.
6. Valery Larbaud, "Paris de France," in Jaune) bleu) blanc (Paris: Gallimard,
19 27), 15·
7. Valery Larbaud, "Vers l'Internationale," in Sous l'invocation de saint Jérôme
(Paris: Gallimard, 1946), 147. This article is devoted to the Précis d)histoire
littéraire de I)Europe depuis la Renaissance (1925), by Larbaud's friend the cele-
brated comparativist Paul Van Tieghem, who was one of the first in France
to lay the basis for an internationalliterary history.
8. Larbaud, Sous l'invocation de saint Jérôme) 15 I.
9.James, The Figure in the Carpet) 385.
1. Principles of a World History of Literature

1. Valery Larbaud, Ce vice impuni) la lecture: Domaine anglais (Paris: Gallimard,
1925),33-34. A revised and substantially enlarged version of the book, ed-
ited by Béatrice MousE, was published by Gallimard in 1988.
2. Ferdinand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism: 15th-18th Century, vol. 3: The
Perspective of the World, trans. Siân Reynolds (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1992), 68.
3. The phrase instances de consécratiorl is due originally to Pierre Bourdieu,
whose rnany translators have tended to render the first term of the phrase
either by the same word in English or, with somewhat greater justification,
as "agencies." l have preferred "authorities," a more natural and surely no
less precise translation. It should be plain in any case that the phrase refers to
the class of critics, translators, publishers, academies, and other institutions
that jointly are responsible for conferring literary prestige and reputation.-
Trans.
4. See Braudel, The Perspective of the World, especially the chapter "Divisions of
Space and Time in Europe," 21-88.
5. Paul Valéry, "La liberté de l'esprit," in Regards sur le monde actuel, in Oeuvres,
ed. Jean Hytier, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1957-1960), 2:1081; emphasis
added.
6. Ibid., 1081,1082,109°.
7· Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Ietter to Carlyle (1827), quoted in Antoine
B-erman, L'épreuve de l'étranger: Culture et traduction dans l'Allemagne roman-
tique (Paris: Gallimard, 1984),92-93.
8. Ibid., 90.
9. Fritz Strich, Goethe und die Weltliteratur (Bern: Franke Verlag, 1946), 17-18;
Goethe quoted in ibid., 18.
10. Valéry, "La liberté de l'esprit," 1090.
II. It goes without saying that, in order to clarifY the use made by Valéry of the
notion of cultural (or literary) capital, l rely on the notion of"symbolic cap-
ital" developed by Pierre Bourdieu, notably in "Le marché des biens sym-
boliques," L'Année sociologique 22 (1971): 49-126; and Randal Johnson, ed.,
The Field cif" Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press,
1993); and that of "literary capital" proposed by Bourdieu in Les règles de
['art (Paris: Seuil, 1992).
12. Valéry, "La liberté de l'esprit," 1090.
13. In 1973, for every 100,000 inhabitants, 52.2 tides were published in France
as against 39.7 in the United States. Analysis of eighty-one countries reveals
between 9 and 100 titles published per 100,000 inhabitants; more than half
of this number (fifty-one countries) published fewer than 20 titles per
100,000 inhabitants. See Priscilla Parkhurst Clark, Literary France: The Mak-
ing cif"a Culture (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1987),217. Each of
these indicators has been studied comparatively in several European coun-
tries and the United States. In each case France turns out to be by far the
most "literary" country, which is to say the one having the largest volume of
literary capital.
14. Paul Valéry, "Pensée et art fi"ançais," in Regards sur le monde actuel, r050.
35 8 1 Notes to Pages 11-16

l 5. Antonio Candido, On Literature and Society, trans. Howard S. Becker (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, l 99 5).
I6. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, I960), 25.
I7. The word "credit"-fi'om the Latin credere, to believe-is synonymous with
power, consideration, authority, importance.
I8. Paul Valéry, "Fonction et mystère de l'Académie," in Regards sur le monde
actuel, II 20.
19. lt will, of course, be understood that writers from outlying spaces are im-
poverished (démunis) not in any material or psychological sense, though
their standard of living may well be lower th an that of writers nearer the
center, but in the specific sense plainly defined in the preceding pages-
namely, that they are deprived, or destitute, ofliterary capital.-Trans.
20. l use the term littérarité in a sense very close to that of Roman Jakobson, for
whom literariness is that by virtue of which a language or a text is literary,
or may be said to be literary: "The subject of literary science is not litera-
ture, but 'literariness' [literaturnost], i.e., that which makes a given work a lit-
erary work"; see Noveishaia russkaia poeziia (Prague: Tipografiia "Politika,"
192I), II, quoted by B. M. Eikhenbaum, "La Théorie de la 'méthode
formelle,'" in Théorie de la littérature: Textes des Formalistes russes, ed. Tzvetan
Todorov (Paris: Seuil, I965), 37. Eikhenbaum adds: "We posited, and con-
tinue to posit, as a fundamental principle that the object of literary science
must be the study of the specifie particularities ofliterary objects that distin-
guish them from all other material . . . R. Jakobson gave this ide a its
definitive formulation."
2I. See Abram de Swaan, "The Emergent World Language System," Interna-
tional Political Science Review I4 Quly I993).
22. Antoine de Rivarol was declared the winner of the competition sponsored
three years later, in I783, by the Academy of Berlin for his Discours sur
l'universalité de la langue française, in recognition of which Frederick II
awarded him a seat in the Academy.
23. Frederick II ofPrussia, De la littérature allemande (Paris: Gallimard, I994), 47.
24. Quoted in Max Daireaux, Panorama de la littérature hispano-américaine (Paris:
Kra, I930), 96.
25. Khlebnikov's aesthetic program was constructed both in conscious opposi-
tion to the "West" and its culture and as a means of affirming the existence
of an inalienable Slavic spirit.
26. Velimir Khlebnikov, "Artists of the World!: AWritten Language for Planet
Earth; a Common System of Hieroglyphs for the People of our Planet,"
in Collected VltOrks C!f Velimir Khlebnikov, ed. Charlotte Douglas, trans. Paul
Schmidt, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, I987-I997),
I:3 64·
27. Swaan, "The Emergent World Language System," 2I9.
Notes to Pages 16-20 1 359

28. Ibid., 222.
29. See Valérie Gannes and Marc Minon, "Géographie de la traduction," in
Traduire l'Europe, ed. Françoise Barret-Ducrocq (Paris: Payot, I992), 55--95.
The authors distinguish "in-translation" (intraduction), the importation of
foreign literary texts into a national language by means of translation, from
"out-translation" (extraduction), the exportation of nationalliterary texts.
30. Larbaud, Ce vice impuni, la lecture, II.
3 I. Ibid., 22-23·
32. Valéry, "La liberté de l'esprit," I09I; emphasis added. "Judges" is also the
term that Cocteau uses to refer--angrily-to theater critics.
33. Valery Larbaud, Sous l'invocation de saint Jérôme (Paris: Gallimard, I946), 76-
77·
34. Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, Paris: Notes d'un Vczudois (Lausanne: Éditions de
l'Aire, 1978), 65.
35. See Paul Valéry, "Fonction de Paris," in Regards sur le monde actuel, ra07-Io.
36. Louis Ulbach, ed., Paris guide, par les principaux écrivains et artistes de la France
Waris: A. Lacroix, I867), xviii-xix. This work, which appeared shortly after
the opening of the second Universal Exposition of Paris, was the result of
collaboration by 125 men and women ofletters.
37. Georg K. Glaser, Secret et violence, trans. Lucienne Foucrault (Paris: Correa,
I95 1), I57·
38. Walter Benjamin, "Ancient Paris, Catacombs, Demolitions, Decline of
Paris," in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 83.
This work, unfinished at the time of Benjamin's death in I940, first ap-
peared in I983 in a two-volume edition prepared by RolfTiedemann.
39. On this "accursed pair" see Benjamin's 6 January 1938 letter to Max Hork-
heimer in The Correspondenœ of VValter Benjamin, 1910-194°, ed. Gershom
Scholem and Theodor Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M.
Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994),549.
40. Roger Caillois, "Puissance du roman. Un example: Balzac," in Approches de
l'imaginaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1974),234.
4I. Daniel Oster, "Paris-guide: D'Edmond Texier à Charles Virmaître," in Écrire
Paris (Paris: Éditions Seesam-Fondation Singer-Polignac, 1990), l I6. Thus
Balzac styled it a "monstrous marvel," "head of the world," and "shimmer-
ing queen of cities." See Caillois, "Puissance du roman," 237.
42. See Daniel Oster and Jean-Marie Goulemot, La vie parisienne: Anthologie des
moeurs au XIXe siècle (Paris: Sand-Conti, I989), I9-2I.
43. Quoted in Oster, "Paris-guide: D'Edmond Texier à Charles Virmaître,"
ra8.
44. As Savinio put it, in both ironie and deferential terms: "No, the Greek gods
have not degenerated ... It is here [to Paris] ... that sacred Delphi has
36 o 1 Notes to Pages 20-2 7

transported its mysteries, its soothing operations against the wrath of the
mountain gods, and the famous omphalos thanks to which it had justly de-
served the name navel of the world"; Souvenirs) trans.jean-Marie Laclavetine
(Paris: Fayard, 1986), 200-20I.
45. Ernst Robert Curtius, The Civilization if France) trans. OliveWyon (New
York: Vintage, I962), 184.
46. See Oster and Goulemot, La vie parisienne) 24.
47. Maxime Du Camp, Paris) ses organes) ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde moitié
du XIXe siècle (1869), quoted in ibid., 25.
48. On this subject see also Giovanni Macchia, Paris en ruines) trans. Paul
Bédarida (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), particularly the third part ("Les ruines
de Paris"), 360--412: "Having become an ancient city like Rome, Athens,
Memphis, and Babylon, Paris seemed obliged in turn to give evidence of its
own grandeur through the spectacle ofits destruction" (363).
49. Caillois, "La ville fabuleuse," in Approches de l'imaginaire) 234.
50. Endre Ady, Hungarian poet (1877-1919) and one of the leaders of the liter-
ary movement associated with the review Nyugat) spent several years in
Paris, where he became acquainted with the work of the French symbolist
poets. As the French correspondent for several Hungarian newspapers, he
chronicled the Paris of the Belle Époque and went on to become one of the
great modernizers of Hungarian thought and poetry. Kis, having translated
his poems, spent many years looking for a publisher.
5 1. Danilo Kis, "Excursion à Paris," trans. Pascale Delpech, Nouvelle revue fran-
çaise) no. 525 (October 1996): 88-II5.
52. Ibid.
53. Octavio Paz, In Light if ln dia) trans. Eliot Weinberger (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1995), 3·
54. juan Benet, Otono en Madrid hacia 1950 (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1987), 8I.
[Here, as in the case of quotation from other foreign works cited in their
original editions, usually because published English versions do not exist, 1
have made my own translations.--Trans.]
55. Henri Michaux, "Lieux lointains," Mercure de France) no. II09 (I january
1956) (special issue in memory of Adrienne Monnier): 52.
56. Quoted by Alexandra Parigoris, "Brancusi: En art il n'y a pas d'étrangers,"
in Le Paris des étrangers: Depuis un siècle) ed. André Kaspi and Antoine Marès
(Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1989), 2I3.
57. Valery Larbaud, "Paris de France," in Jaune) bleu) blanc (Paris: Gallimard,
19 2 7), 15·
58. On the foreign communities settled in Paris, see also Christophe Charle, Les
intellectuels en Europe au XIXe siècle: Essai d)histoire comparée (Paris: Seuil,
I996), IIo-II3·
59. Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Writing (New York: Macmillan, I954), 277.

60. See Christiane Séris, "Microcosme dans la capitale ou l'histoire de la
colonie intellectuelle hispano-américaine à Paris entre 1890 et 19 l 4," in
Kaspi and Marès, Le Paris des étrangers, 299-312.
61. See Antoine Marès, "Tchèques et Slovaques à Paris: D'une résistance à
l'autre," in ibid., 73-89.
62. Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition cj' the New (New York: Horizon, 1959),
212.
63. Quoted by Mario Carelli, "Les Brésiliens à Paris de la naissance du roman-
ticisme aux avant-gardes," in Kaspi and Marès, Le Paris des étrangers, 290.
64. Quoted in Claude Cymerman and Claude Fell, Histoire de la littérature his-
pano-américaine de 1940 à nos jours (Paris: Nathan, 1997), 11.
65. Quoted by Anna Wessely, "The Status of Authors in Nineteenth-Century
Hungary: The Influence of the French Model," in Écrire en France au XIXe
siècle, ed. Graziella Pagliano and Antonio Gomez-Moriana (Longueuil,
Quebec: La Préambule, 1989),2°4. See also Béla Kopeczi and Istvan Soter,
eds., Eszmék és taIalkozc1sok (Budapest: Akedemiai Kiado, 1970), 162.
66. Letter to the Spanish painter Ignacio Zuloaga y Zabaleta (12 February
1923), quoted by Danièle Pistone, "Les musiciens étrangers à Paris au XXe
siècle;' in Kaspi and Marès, Le Paris des étrangers, 249.
67. See Philippe Dewitte, "Le Paris noir de l'entre-deux-guerres,"in ibid., I57-
181.
68. Rubén Dario, Ohras completas, ed. M. Sanmiguel Raimundez, 5 vols. (Ma-
drid: Aguado, 1950-1955), 1:102.
69. Quoted in Haruhisa Kato, "L'image culturelle de la France au Japon," Dia-
logues et cultures 36 (1992): 39.
70. See Gabriela Mistral, Poesfas completas (Madrid: Aguilar, 1958).
71. WaltWhitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed.Justin Kaplan (New
York: Viking, 1982), 519-520. The adjective "frivolous" captures the entire
ambiguity of the image of Paris, capital of liberty but also oflibertinism.
72. See Pierre Bourdieu, "Deux impérialismes de l'universel," in L'Amérique des
Français, ed. Christine Fauré and Tom Bishop (Paris: François Bourin, 1992),
149- 155.
73. The terms "nation" and "national" are used here for the sake of conve-
nience, while taking care to guard against the risk of anachronism.
74. See particularly Daniel Baggioni, Langues et nations en Europe (Paris: Payot,
1997), 74-77· Baggioni distinguishes between "common" and "national"
languages in order to avoid confusion and anachronism.
75. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Riflections on the Origin and
Spread cj'Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
76. Thus Jacques Revel has been able to show how languages were very gradu-
ally associated (through maps) with spaces delimited by "linguistic bound-
362 1 Notes to Pages 31-.35

aries." See Daniel Nordman and Jacques Revel, "La formation de l'espace
français," in Histoire de la France) ed. André Burguière and Jacques Revel, 4
vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1989-1993), 1:1S5-162.
77. The Italian poet Bembo, du Bellay and Ronsard in France, Thomas More in
England, and Sebastian Brant in Germany ail took part in the humanist
rnovement, advocating a return to ancient literatures while defending their
own "illustrious vulgar tongue" (in Dante's phrase).
78. See Charles Tilly, European Revolutions) 1492-1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993),
29-36.
79. See Michael Jeismann, Das Vclterland der Feinde: Studien zum nationalen Feind-
begriff' und Selbsverstandnis in Deutschland und Frankreich) 1792-1918 (Stuttgart:
Klett~Cotta, 1992).
80. See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation) 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1992).
8I. Danilo Kis, La leçon d)anatomie) trans. Pascale Delpech (Paris: Fayard, 1993),
29-3 1. [Selected passages are available in English in Susan Sontag's edition
of KiS's Homo Poeticus) trans. Michael Heim et al. (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 199s).-Trans.]
82. In the Dreyfus Affair, Zola abruptly broke with everything that until than
had linked the writer with the nation, national honor, and nationalist dis-
course, and, by betraying the nationalist right, proclaimed his own auton-
orny. He thereby put himself in a position, in the very name ofhis own au-
tonomy and freedom, to proclaim Dreyfus' innocence. This amounted to
inventing a totally new relation to politics: a sort of denationalized politici-
zation ofliterature.
83. Isaiah Berlin, "The Bent Twig: On the Rise of Nationalism," in The Crooked
Timber ofHumanity: Chapters in the History ofldeas) ed. Henry Hardy (New
York: Knopf, 1991),246.
84. This neglect is due also to the primacy always accorded in literary criticisrn
to the "psychology" of a writer.
8S. Originaily published in an edition of soo copies, printed in Dijon in 1925
by Maurice Darantière for Contact Éditions of Paris.
86. Octavio Paz, In Search of the Present: 1990 Nobel Lecture) bilingual ed., trans.
Anthony Stanton (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), 17.
2. The Invention of Literature

1. In France, frorn the second half of the seventeenth century onward, it was
the state that ordered the exclusive use of the French language. See Michel
de Certeau, Dominique Julia, and Jacques Revel, Une politique de la langue:
La Révolution française" et les patois: L'enquête de Grégoire (Paris: Gallimard,
1975)·
Notes to Pages 35-45 1 36 3

2. See Samuel Beckett's article "Dante ... Bruno. Vico ... Joyce," in Our
Exagmil1atiol1 roul1d His Factificatiol1 for Il1camil1ation of Work in Progres5 (Paris:
Shakespeare & Co., 1929), a volume of essays conceived by Joyce in re-
sponse to sharp criticism in Britain and the United States of Fi1111ega115 Tif/ake!
which was then appearing in fragments in various reviews under the ge-
neric title Work il1 Progress.
3. Benedict Anderson, Imagil1ed Commul1ities: Riflection5 011 the Origil1 and
Spread if Natiol1alism (London: Verso, 1983), 66. The sociolinguist Daniel
Baggioni characterizes the same phenomenon as the first "ecolinguistic
revolution in Western Europe"; see Lal1gues et l1atiol1s en Europe (Paris: Payot,
1997),73-94·
4. Anderson, Imagil1ed Communities! 80.
5. See Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Inventiol1 of Traditiol1 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
6. Marc Fumaroli, "The Genius of the French Language," in Realms if Memory!
ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, 3 vols. (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998), 3:558.
7. Humanism was also a return to two other languages of antiquity, Greek and
Hebrew, on the basis of which one could correct "bad" medieval Latin and
consider oneself closer to the ancients th an the clerics were. Knowledge of
Greek made it possible finally to read the Bible independently of the Vul-
gate.
8. The anachronism "intellectual" is used here to subsume under a single terrn
the fields ofliterature and scholarship. See Fernand Braudel, Le modèle italien
(Paris: Arthaud, 1989),42-47.
9· Ibid., 45,46.
IO. See Françoise Waquet, Le modèle fral1çais et l'Italie savante: Conscience de soi et
perception de l'autre dal1s la République des Lettres! 1660-1750 (Rome: École
Française de Rome, 1989).
II. Luther was not the first to translate the Bible. Others had translated it,
wholly or in part, at the same time or a bit earlier in an attempt to reform
the Church from within.
12. See Baggioni, Lal1gues et 11ations en Europe! 109.
13. Fumaroli, "The Genius of the French Language," 560,565.
14. See Robert-Henri Bautier, Chartes! sceaux et chancelleries: Études de diploma-
tique et de sigillographie médiévales (Geneva: Droz/Paris: Champion, 1990).
15. Joachim du Bellay, The Difence and Illu5tration if the French Language! trans.
Gladys M. Turquet (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1939), 37. See Joseph
Jurt, "Autonomie ou hétéronomie: Le champ littéraire en France et en
Allemagne," Regards Sociologiques! no. 4 (1992): 12. The "second rhetoric"
was a science of versification referred to by this name in fifteenth-century
364 1 Notes to Pages 46-5 2

treatises on the practice of poetry in the vulgar tongue. Accordingly, it stood
in opposition to the Latin rhetoric taught in the schools and the conven-
tional theory of discourse of the period.
I6. See Reinhard Krüger, "Der Kampf der literarischen Moderne in Frank-
reich (I548-I554)," in Nation und Literatur im Europa der frühen Neuzeit) ed.
Klaus Garber (Tübingen: Niemeyer, I989), 344-38I.
I7. See Colette Beaune, Naissance de la nation France (Paris: Gallimard, I985),
300 ff
I8. Fumaroli, "The Genius of the French Language," 563.
I9. Du Bellay, Df!fence and Illustration of French Language) 54-56,39,40; emphasis
added.
20. This metaphor was to be met with later in almost the same terms when the
German romantics were putting their ideas about translation into effect; and
also in the "cannibalistic" manifesto of the Brazilian modernists during the
I920S. See the essay by Pierre Rivas, "Modernisme et primitivisme dans
Macounaïma)" in his critical edition of Mario de Andrade's Macounaïma
(Paris: Stock-UNESCO, I996). The ethnologist Roger Bastide has com-
pared the Pléiade's enterprise with that of the Brazilian modernists in
"Macunaîma visto por um francés;' Revista do Arquivo municipal (Sao Paulo),
no. I06 (January I946).
2I. Du Bellay, Difence and fllustration of French Language) 37; emphasis added.
22. Fumaroli, "The Genius of the French Language," 572.
23. François Lopez, "Le retard de l'Espagne: La fin du Siècle d'or," in Histoire de
la littérature espagnole) ed. Jean Canavaggio, 2 vols. (Paris: Fayard, I993-94),
2:I4·
24. Fumaroli, "The Genius of the French Language," 568.
25. Baggioni distinguishes between "grammatization" and "grammaticaliza-
tion," endorsing the definition of the former term given by Sylvain Auroux,
namely, as a process that leads to describing and using a language on the ba-
sis of two techniques: a grammar and a dictionary; see Langues et nations en
Europe) 93.
26. See ibid., 62-65.
27. See Jean-Pierre Chauveau, Poésie française du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard,
I987), I9; also Jacques Roubaud, La vieillesse d)Alexandre: Essai sur quelques
états du versjrançais (Paris: Ramsay, I988).
28. See Anthony Lodge, French: From Dialect to Standard (London: Routledge,
I993), I53- I88 .
29. Thomas Pavel, L'art de l'éloignement: Essai sur l'imagination classique (Paris:
Gallimard, I996), I52-I55. See also Georges Snyders, La pédagogie en France
aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, I965),
chap. 3 ("Le rôle de l'Antiquité: Le monde latin comme clôture"), 67-83.

30. Émile Durkheim, L'évolution pédagogique en France (Paris: Press Universitaires
de France, I990), 287, 306-307.
3 I. Quoted in Furnaroli, "The Genius of the French Language," 600.
32. The pejorative sense of the term pédant was beginning to develop injust this
context in the mid-seventeenth century; until then the word retained its
originally favorable sense (from the ltalian pedante, meaning one who in-
structs children). See Gaston Cayrou, Dictionnaire du français classique, 2d ed.
(I924; reprint, Paris: Klincksieck, 2000),576.-Trans.
33. Quoted in Fumaroli, "The Genius of the French Language," 600.
34. Ibid., 583.
35. Honorat de Bueil, Marquis de Racan, Vie de monsieur de Malherbe (Paris:
Gallimard, I99I), 42-43; quoted in Fumaroli, "The Genius of the French
Language," 584.
36. "Crocheteurs du Port-au-Foin," or naive authorities on the actual spoken
language of Île-de-France: "When [Malherbe] was asked his opinion about
sorne French word, he usually referred to the hay-pitchers at Port-au-Foin,
and said that these were his rnasters for language"; see Racan, Vie de monsieur
de Malherbe, 4I.
37. Lodge, French, I74.
38. Claude Favre de Vaugelas, Remarques sur la langue françoise, utiles à ceux qui
veulent bien parler et bien écrire, ed. Jean-Claude Streicher (Geneva: Slatkine,
I97 0), 3·
39. Furnaroli, "The Genius of the French Language," 585.
40. Lodge, French, I72.
4I. Walther von Wartburg, Évolution et structure de la langue jrançaise (Bern:
Franke, I962).
42. See Pierre Bourdieu, Ce que parler veut dire (Paris: Fayard, I982), 47-49; also
Alain Viala, Naissance de l'écrivain (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1985),270 ff.
43. See René Bray, La formation de la doctrine classique en France (Paris: Nizet,
I95 I).
44. Ferdinand Brunot, Histoire de la langue française, I3 vols. (Paris: Colin, l 966),
3:4·
45. See Lodge, French, I59.
46. René Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 2d
ed., II vols. (Paris: Vrin, I974-I989), 6:77. Descartes' decision to write in
French is an overlooked aspect of his opposition to the scholastics.
47. Baggioni, Langues et nations en Europe, I87. Baggioni interprets "the process
of standardization of common languages during the sixteenth, seventeenth,
and eighteenth centuries" as the result of a combination of "epilinguistic re-
sources," including guides to proper spelling, grarnrnars, and dictionaries,
with "an instrurnentalization of the language through theory (rnanuals of
366 1 Notes to Pages 59-64

logic, rhetoric, poetics) and practice (reference works and a prestigious liter-
ary corpus)" and "institutions and instruments of linguistic dissemination
and control (schools, acadernies, and so on)"; ibid., 125.
48. Lodge, French, 173; the reference is to Brunot, Histoire de la langue française,
3: 1 7.
49. Vincent Voiture, Oeuvres de Voiture: Lettres et poésies, ed. A. Ubicini, 2 vols.
(Geneva: Slatkine, 1967), 1:294-295.
50. Fumaroli, "The Genius of the French Language," 599. See Georges
Doncieux, Un jésuite homme de lettres au XVIIe siècle: Le père Bouhours (Paris:
Hachette, 1886).
SI. Quoted in Fumaroli, "The Genius of the French Language," 595.
52. See Bernard Magné, La crise de la littérature française sous Louis XIV:
Humanisme et rationalisme, 2 vols. (Lille: Atelier Reproduction des Thèses,
Université Lille-III/Paris: H. Champion, 1976).
53. For a critical look at the traditional view of this quarrel, see Jean-Marie
Goulemot, Le règne de l'histoire: Discours historiques et révolutions, XVIIe-XVlle
siècles (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996), 164-172.
54. See Joseph Jurt, "Sprache, Literatur, Nation, Kosmopolitismus,
Internationalismus: Historische Bedingungen des deutsch-franzosischen
Kulturaustauches," in Le Français aujourd'hui: Une langue à co mprmdre, ed.
Gilles Dorion, Franz-Joseph Meissner, Janos Riesz, and Ulf Wielandt
(Frankfurt: Diesterweg, 1992), 230--241.
55. Quoted in Fumaroli, "The Genius of the French Language," 602-603.
56. Ibid., 604. See also Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Pro cess, trans. Edmund
Jephcott (New York: Urizen, 1978).
57. Still today a whole part of the literary historiography of French classicism is
the direct heir, or possibly the victim, of this partial and biased view; see, for
example, Goulemot, Le règne de l'histoire, 164.
58. Voltaire, Le siècle de Louis XlV, 3 vols. (Frankfurt: Vve. Knoch and J. G.
Eslinger, 1753),3:81.
59. It is well known, of course, that Frederick the Great maintained a corre-
spondence with Voltaire before ascending the throne and that Voltaire re-
sided at his court in Berlin between 1750 and 1753. It was precisely during
this period that the French writer composed and published Le siècle de Louis
XlV.
60. Frederick II ofPrussia, De la littérature allemande (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 81-
82.
61. Antoine de Rivarol, De l'universalité de la langue française (Paris: Obsidiane,
199 1), 9·
62. Ibid., 34; quoted in Fumaroli, "The Genius of the French Language," 605-
606.

63· Rivarol, De l\miversalité de la languefrançaise, 39.
64· Ibid., 20, 37.
65. Louis Réau, L'Europe française au siècle des Lumières (Paris: Albin Michel,
197 1),291.
66. Baggioni, Langues et nations en Europe, 153.
67· Ibid., 154.
68. See Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in
Britail1, 1850-1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991),347.
69. See Linda Colley's treatment of this subject in Britons: Forging the Nation,
1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
70. Thus the argument of Collini in Public Moralists.
71. Ibid., 357.
72. Ibid., 351-358.
73. Hagen Schulze notes the immense cultural consequences of the national
passion in nineteenth-century Germany for the Middle Ages, particularly
the enthusiasm for the neo-Gothic style in architecture, which the Germans
were convinced was "the only properly German style to which it was nec-
essary to 'return"'; see État et nation dans l'histoire de l'Europe, trans. Denis-
Armand Canal (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 198-199.
74. Jurt, "Autonomie ou hétéronomie," 12.
75. See Pierre Pénisson,johann Gottfried Herder: La raison dans les peuples (Paris:
Éditions du Cerf, 1992),200,201.
76. See George Bancroft, "The Life and Genius of Goethe," North American Re-
view I9 (I824): 3°3-325. Note that the use of the expression "The literature
of a nation is national" shows that it was not yet considered a tautology, but
instead was quite a novel idea.
77. Quoted by Frank E. Manuel in his abridged edition of Herder's Ideen:
Refiectiol1s 011 the Philosophy of the History of Mal1kind (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, I968), 98. See also Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, "Herder and the
Formation of an American National Consciousness during the Early Re-
public," in Herder Today: Contributiol1s from the International Herder Conference,
November 5-8, 1987, Stanford, California, ed. Mueller-·Vollmer (Berlin: Walter
de Gruyter, I990), 415-43°; and Pénisson,johann Gottfried Herder, 204-205.
78. See Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, I990), 54; also Anderson, Imagined Communities, 82-
85; and William M. Johnston, The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social
History, 1848-1938 (Berkeley: University of California Press, I972), 265-273
and 344-356.
79. As Benedict Anderson notes, "vernacularizing lexicographers, grammari-
ans, philologists, and litterateurs . . . were central to the shaping of nine-
teenth-century European nationalisms"; Imagined Communities, 69.
80. Baggioni, Langues et nations en Europe, 298.

3. World Literary Space
I. Ferdinand Braudel, Civilizati011 and Capitalism: 15th-18th Century, vol. 3: The
Perspective of the VVorld, trans. Siân Reynolds (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1992),3:47-50.
2. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Riflections on the Origin and
Spread ofNationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 50.
3. See Marc Ferro, Histoire des colonisations: Des conquêtes aux indépendances,
XIIle-XXe siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1994), especially chap. 7.
4. See Anderson, Imagined Communities, 50-65.
5. Arturo Uslar Pietri, InsU1;gés et visionnaires d'Amérique latine, trans. Philippe
Dessommes FIorez (Paris: Criterion, 1995),7--8.
6. Octavio Paz, In Search of the Present: 1990 Nobel Lecture, bilingual ed., trans.
Anthony Stanton (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), 5 [transla-
tion slightly modified].
7. See the chapter titled "La conquête de l'autonomie," in Pierre Bourdieu,
Les règles de l'art (Paris: Seuil, I992), 75-164.
8. Evidence of this may be found particularly in the role played by writers in
debates over spelling reforms. The defense of the national language by the
most conservative authors, who regard it not only as the specific tool of
their trade but also as an element of national property that it is their duty to
protect, reveals their political dependence-this despite their claim to take
part in these debates in the very name ofliterary specificity.
9. Valery Larbaud, Sous l'invocation de saint Jérôme (Paris: Gallimard, 1946), 150.
IO. Pierre Bourdieu, Homo academicus (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1984),226.
II. Gertrude Stein, Paris, France (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940), II.
12. Louis Ulbach, ed., Paris guide, par les principaux écrivains et artistes de la France
(Paris: A. Lacroix, 1867), xxix, xxx.
13. Stein, Paris, France, 8-12.
14. Frederick II ofPrussia, De la littérature allemande (Paris: Gallimard, 1994),28,
33,49·
15. See Jean-Claude Marcadé, "Alexis Kroutchonykh et Vélimir Khlebnikov:
Le mot comme tel," in L'année 1913: Lesformes esthétiques de l'oeuvre d'art à la
veille de la Première Guerre, ed. Liliane Brion-Guerry, 3 vols. (Paris: Klinck-
sieck, 1971-1973), 3:359-36I.
16. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, trans. Lysander Kemp (New York:
Grove, 1985), 194.
17. Danilo Kis, "The Conscience of an Unknown Europe," in Homo Poeticus, ed.
Susan Sontag, trans. Ralph Mannheim et al. (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1995),218.
ed.Jean Hytier, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1957-1960), 2:I083.
19. Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, 218.

20. Paz, In Search C!fthe Present, 10, I4-I6.
21. Ibid., 16.
22. Ibid., 16-17; emphasis added.
23. "It was precisely by contrast, by the vision of the old and the new, the two
great worlds between which he shuttled, the American in Europe, the Eu-
ropean in America, the polarities of the parochial and the cosmopolitan,
that Henry Uames] was to live"; Leon Edel, Henry James, 5 vols. (Philadel-
phia:]. P. Lippincott, 1953-1972),2:193.
24. Mario Vargas Llosa, "The Mandarin," in Making Jïllaves, ed. and trans. John
King (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 132.
25. Danilo Ris, Le résidu amer de l'expérience, trans. Pascale Delpech (Paris: Fayard,
1995), 71.
26. Danilo Kis, "Nous prêchons dans le désert," in Homo poeticus, trans. Pascale
Delpech (Paris: Fayard, 1993), 11.
27. See Max Daireaux, Panorama de la littérature hispano-américaine (Paris: Kra,
193 0),95-106 .
28. Rubén Dario, Historia de mis libros, in Ob ras completas, ed. Alberto Ghiraldo,
-22 vols. (Madrid: Editorial Mundo Latino, 1917-1921), 17=170; emphasis
added.
29. Quoted by Gérard de Cortanze in the introduction ("Rubén Dario ou le
gallicisme mental") to his translation of Rubén Dario, Azul (Paris: La
Difference, 1991), 15.
30.Jorge Luis Borges and Osvaldo Ferrari, "DiaIogo sobre el Modernismo y
Rubén Dario," in Libro de dialogos (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana,
1987), 118-"119·
3 1. Quoted in Régis Boyer, Histoire des littératures scandinaves (Paris: Fayard,
1996),15 2 .
32. See ibid., esp. 135--195.
33. Brandes translated John Stuart Mill's On the Subjection if Women in 1869.
34. Thure Stenstrom, "Les relations culturelles franco-suédoises de 1870 à
1900," in Une amitié millénaire: Les relations entre la France et la Suède à travers
les âges, ed. Marianne Battail and Jean-François Battail (Paris: Beauchesne,
1993),295- 296.
35. Hjalmar Soderberg (1869-1941), a novelist, playwright, and essayist, was no
less famous in Scandinavian countries th an his contemporary August
Strindberg. He is remembered today chiefly for his play Gertrud (1906),
which was adapted for the cinema by Carl Theodor Dreyer in 1964. His
most important works are Forvillelser (Aberrations, 1895), Martin Bircks ung-
dom (The Youth of Martin Birck, 1901), and Den allvarsamma leken (The Se-
rious Game, 1912).
36. Henrik Stangerup, interview with the author, September 1993.
370 1 Notes to Pages 92 -99

37. Ibid.
38. Antonio Candido, On Literature and Society, trans. Howard S. Becker (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 126-127,128-129.
39.Juan Benet, interview with the author,July 1991; Vargas Llosa, "The Man-
darin," 132.
40. Vargas Llosa, interview with the author,JuIy 199I.
41. See Joseph Jurt, "The Reception of Naturaiism in Germany," in Naturalism
in the European Novel: New Critical Perspectives, ed. Brian Nelson (New York:
Berg, 1992),99-119.
42. Joseph Jurt, "Sprache, Literatur, Nation, Kosmopolitismus, Internationalis-
mus: Historische Bedingungen des deutsch-franzosischen Kulturaus-
tauches," in Le Français aujourd'hui: Une langue à comprendre, ed. Gilles
Dorion, Franz-Joseph Meissner, Janos Riesz, and Ulf Wielandt (Frankfurt:
Diesterweg, 1992),235.
43. See Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, eds., Qu'est-ce qu'une littérature
nationale? Approches pour une théorie interculturelle du champ littéraire: Philologues
III (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 1994).
44. Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain,
1850-1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 357.
45. Ibid.
46. Pedro Salinas (1892-1951) was a member of the "generation of 1927." A
cosmopolite and translator, influenced in the early part of his career by fu-
turism, Salinas left Spain in 1939 and settled in the United States, where he
died in Boston.
47. Benet, interview with the author, July 1991. l conducted two interviews
with Juan Benet, one in October 1987 and the other in July 199 l, hoping to
understand the reasons for rus sudden and improbable emergence on the
Spanish literary scene and his place in it.
48. See Michel Espagne, Le paradigme de l'étranger: Les chairs de littérature étrangère
au XIXe siècle (Paris: Cerf: 1993).
49. Christophe Charle has described the same dichotemy in nineteenth-cen-
tury European intellectuallife: "The different conceptions of the role of in-
tellectuals in Europe can be reduced to an opposition between those intel-
lectuals who crossed boundaries and those who guarded them"; see "Pour
une histoire comparée des intellectuels en Europe," Liber: Revue interna-
tionale des livres, no. 26 (March 1996): II.
50. Valery Larbaud, Ce vice impuni, la lecture: Domaine anglais (Paris: Gallimard,
19 2 5),40 7-408 .
51.James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Viking, 1968),
247·
52. Benet, interview with the author,July 1991.

53. Thanks to his brother, who lived in Paris, Benet received French books by
diplomatic pouch; see Otono en Madrid hacia 1950 (Madrid: Alianza Editorial,
1987), 18.
54. After the end of the civil war in 1939, despite its pro-German sympathies
Spain stayed out of the world war that followed. France, in accordance with
a resolution approved by the United Nations on 12 December 1946 con-
demning Franco's regime, sealed off its borders with Spain. Between 1945
and 1949 Spain had no ambassadorial representation abroad.
55. Benet, interview with the author,July 1991.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid.
58. Danilo Ris, "The Anatomy Lesson: Borges," in Sontag, ed., Homo Poeticus, 41.
59. Danilo Ris, La leçon d'anatomie, trans. Pascale Delpech (Paris: Fayard, 1993),
IlS·
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., 29.
62. Ibid., 53-54.
63. -See Taha Hussein, Le livre des jours, with a preface by André Gide (Paris:
Gallimard, 1947); Rabindranath Tagore, L'o.ffrande lyrique, trans. André Gide
(Paris: Gallimard, 1914); and Marguerite Yourcenar, Mishima, ou la vision du
vide (Paris: Gallimard, 1981).
64. See especially Florence Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen,
19 87).
65. Salman Rushdie, "The New Empire within Britain," in Imaginary Home-
lands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991 (London: Granta, 1991), 130.
66. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: Univer-
sity of Michigan Press, 1997),23, 19.
67. Salman Rushdie, The SatanÎc Verses (New York: Viking Penguin, 1989),398-
399·
68. See Valérie Gannes and Marc Minon, "Géographie de la traduction," in
Traduire l'Europe, ed. Françoise Barret-Ducrocq (Paris: Payot, 1992).
69. Quoted in Pico Iyer, "L'empire contre-attaque, plume en main," Gulliver, re-
vue littérarire, no. I I (summer 1993): 41.
70. Salman Rushdie, "Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist," in Imaginary
Homelands, 66.
71. Margaret Atwood, interview with the author, N ovember 1991.
72. On 18 June 1812 the United States declared war on England with a view to
annexing Canada. The English moved to defend their North American ter-
ritories against the threat of invasion and sought to recover lands lost in the
west. The fighting ended in a restoration of the status quo ante, ratified by
the Treaty of Ghent (1814).
372 1 NotestoPages111-122
73.Jane Urquhart, The Whirlpool (Boston: David R. Godine, 1990),63,72, 59.
74. See Mia Couto, Terra sonâmbula (Lisbon: Caminho, 1992).
75. Mia Couto, interview with the author, November 1994.
76. Raphaël Confiant, Aimé Césaire: Une traversée paradoxale du siècle (Paris:
Stock, 1993), 88.
77. Tierno Monénembo, interview with the author, MardI 1993.
4. The Fabric of the Universal

ed.Jean Hytier, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1957-1960),2: lO8I. The full text of
this quotation is given above, Chapter 1, near note 5.
2. Samuel Beckett, Le monde et le pantalon (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1989),21.
The essay originally appeared in Cahiers d'art, vols. 20-21 (1945-1946): 349-
356.
19 2 5), 21 5.
4. See Paul de Man, "A Modern Master: Jorge Luis Borges," in Critical Writ-
ings, 1953-1978 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 123.
5. Larbaud, Ce vice impuni) la lecture) 233.
6. Danilo Kis, Le résidu amer de l'expérience, trans. Pascale Delpech (Paris: Fayard,
1995), lO5·
7. Anna Boschetti has shown that in the person of Sartre were concentrated
every available form of capital-philosophical, literary, critical, political-
held by Paris; see Sartre et Les Temps modernes: Une entreprise intellectuelle
(Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1985).
8. Vargas Llosa, "The Mandarin," in Making VlIczves, ed. and trans. John King
(London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 140-141.
9. Ibid., Ij1-1j2.
lO. Maurice-Edgar Coindreau, "William Faulkner," Nouvelle revue française) no.
19 Oune 193 1): 926-930.
II. See Michel Gresset's preface to Le bruit et la fureur in the Pléiade edition of
Faulkner's novels, Oeuvres romanesques (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 1253.
12. Sartre's review appeared in the July 1939 edition of the Nouvelle revue
française and was reprinted in Situations l (Paris: Gallimard, 1947),65-75.
13. Christophe Charle argues that, at least in the first half of the nineteenth
century, "London and Brussels were the two other alternative liberal cap ..
itals, places of refuge for exiles judged to be dangerous and expelled by the
French government"; see Les intellectuels en Europe au XIXe siècle: Essai
d'histoire comparée (Paris: Seuil, 1996), II2.
14. See Bertrand Marchal's edition of Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes, 2
vols. to date (Paris: Gallimard, 1998-), 1:32.

15. Here 1 intend to stress only a very particular fi.mction of translation that
studies devoted to it seem to have passed over in silence, failing to take into
account the difference between linguistic capital and the transfer of capital
(including the specifie ways in which it can be exchanged).
16. See Itamar Even-Zohar, "Laws of Literary Interference" and "Translation
and Transfer," Poetics Today: International]ournalfor Theory and Analysis c:fLit-
erature and Communication l l, no. l (spring 1990): 53-72 and 73-78.
17. Hence the term in traduction ("in-translation") used by Ganne and Minon
to refer to the importation of foreign literary texts; see Valérie Gannes
and Marc Minon, "Géographie de la traduction," in Traduire 1) Europe) ed.
Françoise Barret-Ducrocq (Paris: Payot, 1992), 58.
18. Though Schmidt never published a complete version of any ofJoyce's work,
brief selections from his unfinished translation of Finnegans TlVàke appeared
posthumously under the tide Arno Schmidts Arbeitsexemplar von Finnegans
TlVàke (Zurich: Arno Schmidt Stifhmg, 1984).
19. See de Man, "A Modern Master," 123.
20. Thus Ganne and Minon refer to the exportation of national texts into an-
-other language as extraduction ("out-translation"); see "Géographie de la
traduction," 58.
21. Pius Ngandu Nkashama, Littératures et écritures en langues qfricaines (Paris:
L'Harmattan, 1992),24-30.
22. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism) 1981-1991 (Lon-
don: Granta, I99I), 17.
23. See Carl Gustav Bjurstr6m's essay, "Strindberg écrivain français," in his
edition of Strindberg's Oeuvre autobiographique) 2 vols. (Paris: Mercure de
France, I990), 2:II99.
24. The Théâtre-Libre, founded in Paris by André Antoine in 1887 with Zola's
patronage, sought to adapt the novelist's naturalist theories and innovations
to the theater, staging a number ofhis plays and novels. The succès de scandale
triggered by Antoine's first productions had tremendous repercussions
throughout Europe. Strindberg, for his part, understood at once that with
the appearance of this new theater he had a chance ofbeing read-and per-
haps recognized-by Zola, then one of the most famous and influential
men ofletters.
25. August Strindberg, letter to Carl Larsson (22 April 1884), in Letters) ed. and
trans. Michael Robinson, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
I99 2),I:I3 6 .
26. August Strindberg, Breil, ed. Torsten Hedlund and Bj0rn Meidal, 22 vols.
(Stockholm: Bonniers, 1948-2001), letter no. 1091, 5: 124-126.
27. There are a good many indications that he also wanted to protect his private
life and not reveal to Swedish readers the story ofhis marriage.

28. See Mark Raeff, "La culture russe et l'émigration," in Histoire de la littérature
russe: Le XXe siècle, 3 vols. (Paris: Fayard, 1987-1990),2:87-103.
29. At the beginning of the 1930S there were only 30,000 Russians left in
Berlin, and half of these, partly German by birth, no longer belonged to the
Russian colony. By contrast, the émigré press and publishing prospered in
Paris, home to the majority of the 4°0,000 Russian refugees who now lived
in France.
30. Fayard published the novel in 1934 under the tide La course du fou. Thirty
years later a new translation appeared with Gallimard as La défense Loujine.
3 1. See Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1990),369.
32. The book was initially published in four consecutive issues of Sovremennyia
Zapiski from May 1932 to May 1933 (nos. 49-52).
33. The book first appeared in English as Camera Obscura; it was througlùy re-
vised by the author and reissued in 1938 as Laughter in the Dark.
34. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov, 419.
35. Letter to Zinaida Chakhovskaya (October 1935), quoted in ibid., 42I.
36. Nabokov moved to Paris from Berlin in 1937 and lived there until 1940.
37. The original version of this novel was eventually published in Paris, by the
Olympia Press in 1953, and then translated into French by the author in
collaboration with Ludovic and Agnès Janvier.
38. The English version of Molloy (translated in collaboration with Paul
Bowles) appeared in 1955. Textsfor Nothing was not published until 1967.
39. Though Larbaud is mentioned in various dictionaries (invariably as a
"writer" first) , Coindreau's name does not even appear.
40. Quoted in Larbaud, Ce vice impuni, la lecture, 36-37. Thus Larbaud tried to
defend the task of translators by giving them, at once seriously and ironi-
cally, a patron saint. He chose Saint Jerome, the author of the Vulgate (or
Latin version of the Bible), insisting on the importance of the cultural
change brought about by Jerome's translation. It was Jerome "who gave the
Hebrew Bible to the Western world, and constructed the broad viaduct that
linked Jerusalem to Rome and Rome to aIl the peoples of the Romance
languages . . . What other translator carried out so colossal an enterprise
with such success and with consequences so far-reaching in time and space?
... Words issuing from his words praise the Lord to the sound ofbar~os in
negro spirituals, and sob on guitars, in tristes and modinhas, in places where
the speech of the peasants of Latium meets the speech of Guarani Indians";
Sous l'invocation de saintJérôme (Paris: Gallimard, 1946),54.
41. Larbaud, Ce vice impuni, la lecture, 31-32.
42. Maurice Nadeau, Gr&ces leur soient rendues (Paris: Albin Michel, 1990),343.
43. Quoted in Rita Gombrowicz, Gombrowicz en Europe: Témoignages et docu-
Notes to Pages 138- 1 44 1 375

ments, 1963-1969 (Paris: Denoël, I988), I6. The Congrès pour la Liberté de la
Culture was an international organization based in Paris (with covert fund-
ing from U.S. intelligence services) and devoted to combatting Communist
influence among intellectuals; see Pierre Grémion, Intelligence de l'anticom-
munisme: Le Congrès pour la Liberté de la Culture à Paris (1950-1975) (Paris:
Fayard, I995).
44. Jelenski first translated extracts of Perdydurke and Trans-Atlantyk and submit-
ted the text to a number of publishers in Paris, ail of whom turned it down.
Through him François Bondy, editor of the review Preuves, discovered the
Spanish edition of Perdydurke and published the first review of it in France
("Note sur Perdydurke," Preuves, no. 32 [October I953]). This notice aroused
the interest of the publisher Maurice Nadeau, who five years later brought
out a French translation in Julliard's "Les Lettres Nouvelles" series. Jelenski
also published a great many articles on Gombrowicz's work, including three
pie ces in Preuves: "Witold Gombrowicz," no. 34 (December I953); "Witold
Gombrowicz ou l'irrmlaturité adulte," no. 95 Oanuary I959); and "Gom-
browicz et Ionesco," (no. I88 [October I966]). In addition to the preface he
- wrote for the first French edition of Perdydurke and his own translation of
Trans-Atlantyk,Jelenski collaborated with Geneviève Serreau on translations
of four other works by Gombrowicz and, with Dominique de Roux, edited
Le cahier Gombrowicz (Paris: Éditions de l'Herne, I97I).
45.Witold Gombrowicz, Diary, ed. Jan Kott, trans. Lillian Vallee, 3 vols.
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, I988-I993), 3:84.
46. Witold Gombrowicz,journal, trans. Allan Kosko et al., 3 vols. (Paris: Chris-
tian Bourgois, I98I), 3:62.
47. Ibid., I:3 66.
48. The first French translation of Perdydurke was by Gombrowicz himself (un-
der the pseudonym of Brone) with the assistance of Roland Martin, a
French journalist working in Argentina.
49. See "Ulysse: Note sur l'histoire du texte," in James Joyce, Oeuvres complètes,
ed.Jacques Aubert et al., 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, I995-I996), 2:I030-33.
50. Philippe Soupault implied in his preface that "the first attempt rat transla-
tion] made by Samuel Beckett, an Irishman and teaching assistant at the
École Normale . . . assisted in this task by Alfred Péron, an agrégé de
l'université," had been largely revised and altered.
5 I. From time to time one encounters a few ritual criticisms regarding the ap-
propriateness of this or that choice (which only serve to emphasize the lofty
conception of the prize) but also the institution itself, su ch as George
Steiner's diatribe, "The ScandaI of the Nobel Prize," New York Times Book
Review, 30 September I984, whose infuriated tone demonstrates, if any fur-
ther proof were needed, the undeniable importance of the prize.
52. There have been a few attempts at creating a rival prize, such as the Neu-

stadt Prize, established in I969 and awarded by an international jury ofwrit-
ers, but none has met with unanimous approvaI.
53. Korea Herald) I7 October I995; Nicole Zand, "Prodigieuse Corée," Le
Monde) 24 November I995.
54. See Patrick Maurus, ed. and trans., La chanteuse de P)ansori: Prose coréenne
contemporain (Arles: Actes Sud, I997), 53.
55. Tsu-Yü Hwang, quoted in GOteborgs-Posten) 24 June I984.
56. Jorge Amado, interview with the author, September I993. Torga has since
died.
57. It is to be regretted, however, that in choosing betweenJosé Saramago and
Ant6nio Lobo Antunes the Swedish Academy should have priviledged the
more "national" of the two and the upholder of a conservative aesthetic of
the novel. Antunes, an innovator, the creator of new literary forms, is un-
questionably the only true Portuguese "classic of the future."
58. For all historical details, descriptions of the internaI functioning of the com-
mittee, and citations from the archives of the Swedish Academy l rely on the
history of the prize recounted by Kjell Espmark-himself a member of the
Academy-in The Nobel Prize in Literature: A Study if the Criteria behind the
Choices (Boston: G. K. Hall, I986). An internai, descriptive, and commemo-
rative history that is too closely bound up with the institution it describes,
Espmark's work is valuable more as an insider's account than as an attempt at
anaIysis.
59. These phrases are found in the Nobel Committee's recommendations for
the years I90I, I903, and I908, respectively; see ibid., 32--33.
60. Ibid., 32 , 57, 4I.
6I. Ibid., 59.
62. Ibid., I36.
63. Ibid., I32. The second Nobel Prize awarded to an East Asian writer aIso
went to aJapanese author, Kenzaburo Oe, though not until I994.
64. The monopolistic nature of the system is sometimes unwittingly acknowl-
edged. Thus, for example, DonaId Keene was quoted (in the 8 December
I968 issue of the New York Times Book Review) as saying that the Nobeljury
wished to incorporate the Japanese novel, through the prize given to Kawa-
bata, into "the mainstream of world literature." A professor ofJapanese liter-
ature and civilization at Columbia University, Keene was one of three ex-
perts appointed by the Nobel Committee to evaluate Kawabata's work.
65. Gao Xingjian, interview with the author, 28 December 2000.
66. Ibid.
67. See Gao Xingjian, La montagne de râme) trans. Noël and Liliane Dutrait
(Paris: L'Aube, I995), subsequently published in English as Soul Mountain)
trans. Mabel Lee (New York: HarperCollins, 2000).
68. Epsmark, The Nobel Prize in Literature) 73,76.

69. In this connection one recalls the French writer René Étiemble's attack
on "Eurocentrism" and his pIe a on behalf of "exotic," "marginal," and
"small" literatures in Essais de littérature (vraiment) générale (Paris: Gallimard,
I974). See also his earlier work Comparaison n'est pas raison (Paris: Gallimard,
I9 6 3)·
70. Ernest Boyd, lreland's Literary Renaissance, rev. ed. (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, I922), 404, 406. Boyd attacked Larbaud on another occasion, in an
article published in the l 5 June I924 issue of the New York Herald Tribune.
71. Larbaud, Ce vice impuni, la lecture, 234.
72. See Béatrice Mousli, Vcllery Larbaud (Paris: Flammarion, I998), 369-370.
73. Valery Larbaud, "À propos de James Joyce et de 'Ulysse': Réponse à M. Er-
nest Boyd," Nouvelle revue française, no. 24 Ganuary I925): I-I7.
74. Marthe Robert, "Kafka en France," in Le siècle de Kcifka (Paris: Centre Geor-
ges-Pompidou, I984), I5-I6.
75. Larson has published widely on African literature and, in particular, on
Achebe's own work; see, for example, The Emergence of African Fiction, rev. ed.
(London: Macmillan, I978).
76. Ghinua Achebe, "Colonialist Criticism," in Hopes and Impediments (London:
Heinemann International, I988), 5I-52.
77. Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, "Lettre à Bernard Grasset," in Oeuvres complètes,
20 vols. (Lausanne: Rencontre, I967-I968), I2:272.
78.Jean Cassou, Nouvelle revue française, no. 23 Guly--December I924): I44.
79. Octave Crémazie, "Lettre à l'abbé Casgrain du 29 janvier I867," in Oeuvres
complètes (Montreal: Beauchemin, I896); quoted in Dominique Combe,
Poétiques francophones (Paris: Hachette, I995), 29.
80. From a letter written by Ibsen to the king, quoted by Régis Boyer in the
introduction to his translation of Ibsen's Peer Gynt (Paris: Flammarion,
I994), I3·
8 I. In I898 Shaw published The Peifect f/Vagnerite, in which he examined The
Ring in the light of the anarchist and socialist ideas of the German revolu-
tionary movement to which the composer had belonged in I848-49.
82. Arthur Wing Pinero (I855-I934) was a popular author of light comedies
who had recently turned to psychological drama.
83. George Bernard Shaw, "Wagner in Bayreuth," English fllustrated Magazine,
October I889; reprinted in Dan H. Laurence, ed., Shaw's Music: The Com-
plete Musical Criticism, 3 vols. (New York: Dodd, Mead, I98I), I:802.
84. George Bernard Shaw, "A Neglected Moral of the Wagner Centenary," New
Statesman, 3 l May I9I3; reprinted in Laurence, Shaw's Music, 3:645.
85. George Bernard Shaw, "The Performance of Grieg's Peer Gynt in London,"
Dagbladet (Oslo), 18 March 1889; reprinted in Laurence, Shaw's Music, 1:582.
86. See Jacques Robichez, Le symbolisme au théâtre: Lugné-Poë et les débuts de
l'oeuvre (Paris: L'Arche, I957), 99.

87. Ibid., 155·
88. Henrik Ibsen, interview in Le Figaro, 4 January 1893, quoted in ibid., 157.
89. Ibid., 272.
90. Ibid., 276, 288.
9I. G. B. Shaw, "L'oeuvre," Saturday Review, 30 March 1895; reprinted in Ayot
St. Lawrence, ed., Collected Works of G. B. Shaw, 30 vols. (New York: William
H. Wise, 193 1),23 :76-77.
5. From Literary Internationalism to Commercial Globalization?

1. See Daniel Oster and Jean-Marie Goulemot, La vie parisienne: Anthologie des
moeurs au XIXe siècle (Paris: Sand-Conti, 1989),24-25.
2. Danilo Kis, "Paris, la grande cuisine des idées," in Homo poeticus, trans.
Pascale Delpech (Paris: Fayard, 1993), 52.
3. Valérie Gannes and Marc Minon, "Géographie de la traduction," in Fran-
çoise Barret-Ducrocq, ed., Traduire l'Europe (Paris: Payot, 1992),64.
4. See Martin Chalmers, "La réception de la littérature allemande en Angle-
terre: Un splendide isolement," Liber: Revue internationale des livres, no. 18
aune 1994): 20-22.
5. Ibid., 22.
6. See Gannes and Minon, "Géographie de la traduction," 67.
7. See Bourdieu's chapter "Le point de vue de l'auteur: Quelques propriétés
générales des champs de production culturelle," in Les règles de l'art (Paris:
Seuil, 1992),298-390.
19 2 5),4°7-408 .
9. André Schiffrin, "La nouvelle structure de l'édition aux États-Unis;' Liber:
Revue internationale des livres, no. 29 (December 1996): 2-5. The argument of
this article is developed more fully in Schiffrin, The Business of Books: How
International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the JïVczy JIVé
Read (New York: Verso, 2000).
10. This figure includes purely commercial houses as weIl as ones that have
sought to preserve a balance between profitability and traditional stan-
dards of editorial responsibility; see SchifIrin, "La nouvelle structure de
l'édition," 2.
l I. Ibid., 3.
12. Thus Jean-Marie Bouvaist quotes the American publisher Richard Snyder
as saying, "Tt is better to publish anything than not to publish at aIl";
see Crise et mutation dans l'édition jYançaise (Paris: Éditions du Cercle de la
Librairie, 1993),7. See also Bourdieu, Les règles de l'art, 202-210.
13. See Bouvaist, Crise et mutation dans l'édition française, 400.
14. 1 use the term "neocolonial novel" to refer to the work of writers from for-
merly colonized countries who, while giving the impression of breaking

with tradition, reproduce the narrative techniques of the colonial novel in
its most conservative form.
15. See, for example, Arturo Pérez-Reverte's novel El Club Dumas (Madrid:
Alfaguara, 1993).
16. See Bouvaist, Crise et mutation dans l'édition française, 14.
6. The Small Literatures

1. André de Ridder, La littérature flamande contemporaine (Antwerp: L. Op de-
beek/Paris: Champion, 1923), 15.
2. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: Univer-
sity of Michigan Press, 1997), 103.
3. Octavio Paz, In Search cf the Present: 1990 Nobel Lecture, bilingual ed., trans.
Anthony Stanton (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990),6-7.
4· Glissant, Poeties cf Relation, lo7n.
5. Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, Questions (Lausanne: Éditions d'Aujourd'hui,
1935); reprinted in La pensée remonte les fleuves (Paris: Plon, 1979),292.
6. Istvân Bibô, Misère des petits états d'Europe de l'Est, trans. Gyorgy Kassai
(paris: Albin Michel, 1993), I76.
7. Interview with Nicole Zand in the November 1992literary supplement of
Le Monde, "Carrefour des littératures européennes."
8. Miroslav KrleZa, "Choix de textes," trans. Janine Matillon, Le messager
européen, no. 8 (1994): 357-358.
9. Milan Kundera, "The Unloved Child of the Family," in Testments Betrayed,
trans. Linda Asher (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 192.
IO. Janine Matillon, "Hommes dans de sombres temps: Miroslav Krlda," Le
messager européen, no. 8 (1994): 349.
II. Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, "Besoin de grandeur," in La pensée remonte les
fleuves, 97.
I2. Ramuz, Questions, in ibid., 320.
13. Samuel Beckett, "Home Olga;' quoted in Lawrence E. Harvey, Samuel
Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, I970), 296.
The poem was composed in 1932 and published two years later in Contempo
III (Chapel Hill, N.C.), I5 February I934.
14. Samuel Beckett, Dream cf Fair and Middling fM>men, ed. Eoin O'Brien and
Edith Fournier (Dublin: Black Cat Press, I992), l S8; quoted in Harvey, Sam-
uel Beckett, 338.
IS. E. M. Cioran, "Entretien avec Fritz J. Raddatz," Die Zeit, 4 April I986;
quoted in Gabriel Liiceanu, Itinéraires d'une vie: E. M. Cioran, suivi de "Les
continents de l'insomnie": Entretien avec E. M. Cioran (paris: Michalon, I995), 63.
16. "Concerning our people, l think more than ever that no illusion is permit-
ted. l feel toward it a sort of despairing contempt"; letter to Aurel Cioran,
380 1 Notes to Pages 171- 183

30 August 1979, quoted in ibid., 101; E. M. Cioran, Schimbarea lajàfcl a
Romaniei (Bucharest: Editura Vremea, 1936); quoted in Liice anu, Itinéraires
d)une vie) 50.
17. E. M. Cioran, "Mon pays," Le messager européen} no. 9 (1995): 67.
18. Quoted in Liiceanu, Itinéraires d)une vie) 36.
19. See Max Daireaux, Panorama de la littérature hispano-américaine (Paris: Kra,
1930), }2.
20. This phrase occurs in the French translation of Farah's 1990 essay "Child-
hood of My Schizophrenia," which appeared as "L'enfance de ma schizo-
phrénie," Le serpent à plumes) no. 21 (fàll 1993): 6. The original text (which
refers to "colonial contradiction") is quoted in Chapter 9, near note 9.
21. Witold Gombrowicz, Diary) ed. Jan Kott, trans. Lillian Vallee, 3 vols.
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988-1993), 1:4-6.
22. Krlda, "Choix de textes," 355.
23. Samuel Beckett, "Recent Irish Poetry," in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and
a Dramatie Fragment) ed. Ruby Cohn (London:John Calder, 1983),70.
24. Henri Michaux, "Lettre de Belgique," Transatlantic Review 2 (December
1924): 678-681; reprinted in Henri Michaux, Oeuvres complètes) ed. Ray-
mond Bellour with Ysé Tran, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1998-2004), 1:51-55.
25. Pierre Bourdieu, "Existe-t-il une littérature belge? Limites d'un champ et
frontières politiques," Études de lettres, October-December 1985,3-6.
26. Michaux, "Lettre de Belgique," in Oeuvres complètes, 1: 5 1.
27. Ibid.
28. See Henri Michaux, "Quelques renseignements sur cinquante-neuf années
d'existence," first published in Robert Bréchon, Henri Michaux (Paris:
Gallimard, 1959); reprinted in Michaux, Oeuvres complètes, l:cxxix-cxxxv.
29. Michaux, "Lettre de Belgique," in Oeuvres complètes, 1:52.
30. Ibid., 53·
3 1. Samuel Putnam, Maida Castelhun Darnton, George Reavey, and Jacob
Bronowski, eds., The European Caravan: An Anthology of the New Spirit in Eu-
ropean Literature (New York: Brewer,Warren and Putnam, 1931).
32. Quoted in Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 129-130.
33. Michaux, "Lettre de Belgique," in Oeuvres complètes, 1:54.
34. See Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995),23-25.
35. Quoted in Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 197. Cuchulain was the mythical Irish
hero of the "Ulster cycle" (ninth to thirteenth centuries), restored to honor
by W B. Yeats. Son of the god Lug, having seven fingers on each hand and
seven toes on each foot, as well as seven pupils in each eye, Cuchulain was
the incarnation of Irish national anger and independence.

36. Kim Yun-Sik, "Histoire de la littérature coréenne moderne," trans. A. Fabre,
Culture coréenne, no. 40 (September 1995): 4.
37. Kundera, "The Unloved Child of the Family," 193.
38. Quoted in Kiberd, IrLVenting Ire/and, 2 18.
39. James Joyce, "The Day of the Rabblement," in The Critical Writings <?fJames
Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1959),
70-7I; emphasis added.
40. "Prises de position" in the French text-another phrase familiar from the
work of Pierre Bourdieu, which has standardly been translated as "position-
takings." 1 have taken similar liberties in the case of a number of other
"technical" terms, especially spécifique, which seldom needs to be translated
by the same word in English, as is so often done. No reader, 1 believe, is
likely to be conD.lsed or otherwise inconvenienced by these mild departures
from customary practice. The scope and meaning of "prise de position"
are discussed by Randal Johnson in his introduction to The Field if Cultural
Production (New York: Columbia University Press, I993), I6-17; see also
Bourdieu's own elucidation of the term in Les règles de l'art (Paris: Seuil,
1992), I3 1-138.-Trans.
41. See Gisèle Sapiro, La guerre des écrivains: 1940-1953 (Paris: Fayard, I999), espe-
cially the first part, "Logiques littérarires de l'engagement," 2 I-247; also
Anne Simonin, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1942-1955,' Le devoir d'insoumission
(Paris: IMEC Éditions, 1994), especially chap. 2, "Littérature oblige," 55-99.
42. Thus the title of Ramuz's 1914 manifesto, originally published as the first
issue of Cahiers vaudois and subsequently in book form as Raison d'être
(Lausanne: Éditions du Verseau, I926).
43.James Ngugi, "Response to Wole Soyinka's 'The Writer in a Modern Afri-
can State,'" in The Writer in Modem Africa, ed. Per Wastberg (New York:
Africana Publishing, 1969), 56; quoted in Neil Lazarus, Resistance in Post-
colonial African Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990),207.
44. Quoted in Denise Coussy, Le roman nigérian anglophone (Paris: Éditions Silex,
I9 88 ),491.
45. Chinua Achebe, "The Novelist as Teacher," in Hopes and Impediments (Lon-
don: Heinemann International, 1988), 30. This essay first appeared in the
New Statesman (29 January 1965) and was subsequently reprinted in Moming
Yet on Creation Day (London: Heinemann, 1975) and again in Hopes and Im-
pedil11ents, 27-3 1. "The Role of a Writer in a New Nation" was first pub-
lished in Africa Report 15 (March 1970).
46. André Burguière and Jacques Revel have also stressed the role of historical
narratives in the construction of France as a political entity; see Burguière
and Revel, eds., Histoire de la France, 4 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1989-I993), I:IO-
I3·
3 82 1 Nates ta Pages 191-196

47. Roland Barthes, "L'effet de réel," in Littérature et réalité, ed. Gérard Genette
and Tzvetan Todorov (Paris: Seuil, 1982),81-90; Michael RifElterre, "L'illu-
sion référentielle," in ibid., 93.
48. See Jean-Pierre Morel, Le roman Î11Supportable: L'Internatiol1ale littérarire et la
Fra11ce, 1920-1932 (Paris: Gallimard, 1985).
49.Juan Benet, interview with the author,July 1991.
50. Danilo Kis, "Nous préchons dans le désert," in Homo poeticus, trans. Pascale
Delpech (Paris: Fayard, 1993), 13-14.
5 1. Danilo Kis, "Homo Poeticus, Regardless," in Homo Poeticus, ed. Susan Son-
tag (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 78.
52. Danilo Kis, "Variations on Central European Themes," in ibid., 106. The
Serbs' avowed subrnission to Moscow encouraged the Croats to distinguish
themselves by choosing Paris as their intellectual pole.
53. "In [South] Korea ... nationalism is a generic, all-encompassing, primary
term. Ail discourse is nationalist. One is nationalist-or, more exactly, na-
tionalist-messianic-before being 'on the Left' or identifying oneself with
the 'masses' or claiming to be a liberal or a Buddhist": see Patrick Maurus'
introduction to his annotated edition of selected poems by Shin Kyong-
Nim, Le rêve d'un homme abattu: Choix de poèmes (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 10.
54. Ibid., IO-II.
55. Carlos Fuentes, Geografia de la novela (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura
Econ6rnica, 1993), 14.
56. And not "nunor" literatures-a term found in a translation by Marthe
Robert that another translator of Kafka, Bernard Lortholary, has called "in-
exact and tendentious"; see "Le testament de l'écrivain," in Un jeûl1eur et
autres nouvelles (Paris: Flammarion, 1993),35. Kafka used the German word
klein.
57. Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, ed. Max Brod, trans.Joseph Kresh
(New York: Schocken, 1948), 191.
58. Max Brod, Franz Kajka: A Biography, trans. G. Humphreys-Roberts and
Richard Winston, 2d ed. (New York: Schocken, 1960), IlL
59. Kafka, Diaries, I94, I9 I-I92, 194·
60. From Kafka's entry for 8 October 191 l, ibid., 87.
61. Ibid., 193,194.
62. Ibid., 194.
63. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure
(Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1975).
64· Ibid., 75-77.
65. See Klaus Wagenbach, Franz Kafka: Eine Biographie seiner Jugend, 1883-1912
(Bern: Franke, I958), available in French as Franz Kajka: Années de jeunesse
(1883-1912), trans. Élisabeth Gaspar (Paris: Mercure de France, 1967).
Notes ta Pages 197-2°3 1 383

66. Deleuze and Guattari, Kqfka, 35,33.
67· Ibid., 75, 74,3 2 .
7. The Assimilated
I. See, for example, Kazimierz Brandys, A Warsaw Diary: 1978-1981) trans.
Richard Lourie (New York: Random House, I983).
2. Israel Zangwill, "Anglicization," in Ghetto Comedies (New York: Macmillan,
I9 0 7), 59.
3. James Joyce, "OscarWilde: The Poet of 'Salomé,'" in The Critical Writings cif·
James Joyce) ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking,
I959),202.
4. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Modern Library, I96I), 6.
5. See V S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now (London: Heinemann,
I99 0 ),6-7·
6. See V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma cifArrival (New York: Vintage, I988), 97-I79.
7. Salman Rushdie, "v. S. Naipaul," in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criti-
cÎsm) 1981--1991 (London: Granta, I99I), I48,
8. Naipaul, The Enigma cifArrival) I30, III.
9. Ibid., 30, I96, 20-2I, 92.
IO. V S. Naipaul, "Our Universal Civilization," adapted from the Walter B.
Wriston lecture delivered by Naipaul at the Manhattan Institute in New
York and published in the New York Review cif·Books) 3 l January I99I, 22-25.
II. Ibid., 22-23. See also V. S. Naipaul, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey
(London: Deutsch, I98I).
I2. A perspective that has changed over the years, from his first trip in I962, re-
counted in An Area of Darkness (I964), his next visit in I975, which pro-
duced lndia: A VVounded Civilization (I977), and then the most recent one, in
I990, reported in India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990).
I3. Naipaul, lndia: A Million Mutinies Now) 392, 398.
14. Salman Rushdie, "Naipaul among the Believers," in lmaginary Homelands,
375. See, for example, V. S. Naipaul, Guerrillas (London: Deutsch, I975).
I5. The Nobel awarded to Naipaul broke with the entire unspoken tradition of
the prize's political progressivism.
16. See Jean-Pierre Martin, Henri Michaux: Écritures de soi, expatriations (Paris:
José Corti, 1994),288.
17. "It is my faults of elocution," Cioran wrote, "my stamrnerings, my jerky way
of speaking, my art of mumbling; it is my voice, my 'r's from the other end
of Europe that led me by way of reaction to take sorne care over what 1
write and to make myself more or less worthy of an idiom that 1 misuse ev-
ery time 1 open my mouth"; Écartèlement (Paris: Gallimard, I979), 76.
3 84 1 Notes to Pages 203-21 3

18. Foreigners in Michaux's writings are often suspect: "Foreigners are cor-
ralled in camps, on the edges of the territory. They are admitted inside the
country only gradually and after many ordeals." See the definitive version of
Voyage en Grande Garabagne published as part of Ailleurs (Paris: Gallimard,
1948),5 0-51.
19. Henri Michaux, "Quelques renseignements sur cinquante-neuf années
d'existence," in Robert Bréchon, Henri Michaux (Paris: Gallimard, 1959).
20. Ibid., 12.
21. Henri Michaux, Plume) précédée par Lointain intérieur (Paris: Gallimard, 1938),
68. As an adolescent he was fascinated by problems associated with heredity
and genealogy, obsessed by a concern with personal freedom and by the
tormenting question of whether he could free himself from his origins.
22. Michaux, "Quelques renseignements," 17.
23. Quoted in Gabriel Liiceanu, Itinéraires d)une vie: E. M. Cioran) suivi de ((Les
continents de l)insomnie": Entretien avec E. M. Cioran (Paris: Michalon, 1995),
d)U1te vie) 114.
24. See ibid., 124: "We were very close friends, he even asked me to be his liter-
ary executor, but 1 declined."
25. Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, Raison d)être (Paris: La Différence, 1991), 29.
26. Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, Paris: Notes d)un Uludois (Lausanne: Éditions de
l'Aire, 1978),66.
8. The Rebels
1.Within the general pro cess ofliterary dissimilation, a founding phase (dur-
ing which a literary heritage is constituted) must be distinguished from sub-
sequent stages during which the literary emancipation of a national space
takes place.
2. Samuel Burdy, The History of Ireland from the Earliest Ages to the Union (Edin-
burgh: Doig and Stirling, 1817),567.
3. Quoted in Patrick Rafroidi, L'Irlande et le Romantisme (Lille: Presses Uni-
versitaires de Lille, 1972), IL
4. Joachim du Bellay, The Difence and Illustration of the French Language) trans.
Gladys M. Turquet (London:]. M. Dent and Sons, 1939), 26.
5. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar," in Selections from Ralph
Waldo Emerson) ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press,
1960),68,67, 79.
6. See the chapter "Realismo magico," in Arturo Uslar Pietri, Go dos) insur-
gentes y visionarios (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1986), 135-140.
7. Ibid., 40.
8. Alejo Carpentier, "América ante lajoven literatura europea," first published

In Cartelas (28 June I93 I) and reprinted in La novela latinoamericana en
visperas de un nuevo siglo y otras ensayos (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, l 98 I), 5 I-
59; quotation on 55-56.
9. Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, Paris: Notes d'un vaudois (Lausanne: Éditions de
l'Aire, 1978), 65.
IO. Thus Kim Yun-Sik observes that in the second half of the 1920S "Korean
literature exhibited two poles: proletarian literature on the one hand and, on
the other, the nationalist literature that was constituted in opposition to it";
see "Histoire de la littérature coréenne moderne," trans. A. Fabre, Culture
coréenne, no. 40 (September I995): 7.
II. Plays: Mouloud Mammeri, La mort absurde des Aztèques, suivi de Le Banquet
(Paris: Perrin, I973); Le Foehn, ou, la Preuve par neuf (Paris: Publisud, I982);
La cité du soleil (Algiers: Laphornic, 1987). Grammar: Mouloud Mammeri,
Grammaire berbère (Paris: Maspero, 1976). Folktale collections: Mouloud
Mammeri, ed., Tellem Chaho! et Machaho!: Contes berbères de Kabylie (Paris:
Bordas, 1980). Poetry: Mouloud Mammeri, ed., Poèmes kabyles anciens (Paris:
Maspero, 1980); see also Mammeri's earlier edition of Les Isifra: Poèmes de Si-
Mohand-ou-Mhand (Paris: Maspero, 1969).
12. From an unpublished preface to the novel composed in 1926 and quoted by
Michel Riaudel, "Toupi or not toupi: Une aporie de l'être national," in Pi-
erre Rivas's critical edition of the French translation, Macounaïma (Paris:
Stock, 1996),300.
13. See Alain Ricard, Livre et communication au Nigeria (Paris: Présence Africaine,
1975),40-46.
14. D. O. Fagunwa, The Forest of a Thousand Daemons: A Hunter's Saga, trans.
Wole Soyinka (New York: Random House, 1982), I.
15. The book was originally published in London by Faber. A French transla-
tion by Raymond Queneau appeared the following year with Gallimard
under the tide L'ivrogne dans la brousse.
16. Quoted in Denise Coussy, Le roman nigérian anglophone (Paris: Éditions Silex,
I988), 20.
17. The cinema can promote the' same sort of subversion and opposition in
countries where authoritarian regimes exercise strict censorship over artists.
I8. Pius Ngandu Nkashama has pointed out the importance in the 1960s of
theatrical associations and groups such as the Makerere Travelling Theater,
which made it possible for great works of drama to be staged in African lan-
guages in both Uganda and Kenya; see Littératures et écritures en langues
africaines (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1992),326.
19. Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kajka, ed. Max Brod, trans.Joseph Kresh
(New York: Schocken, I948), 87; emphasis added.

20. From Gilles Carpentier's introduction to his edited volume of interviews
with Kateb Yacine, Le poète comme boxeur: Entretiens, 1958-1989 (Paris: Seuil,
1994), 9·
21. Kateb Yacine, interview with Jacques Alessandra, "Le théâtre n'est pas
sorcier," in ibid., 77-78.
22. Ibid., 58,67,74.
23. Six years earlier he had published a series of essays under the tide Homecom-
ing: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature (London: Heinemann, 1972).
24. See Neil Lazarus, Resistance in Postcolonial Ajfican Fiction (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1990),214.
25. See Jacqueline Bardolph, Ngugi wa Thiong'o: L'homme et l'oeuvre (Paris:
Présence Africaine, 1991),26; also 58-59.
26. The term refers to any of a number of regional forms of Canadian French
thought to be substandard and associated with a lack of education.-·Trans.
27. Haruhisa Kato has proposed the term "phagocytosis" to describe one of the
constant features of Japanese civilization, noting that "capturing, ingesting,
and digesting foreign bodies is the most efficient means of conserving one's
own identity while deriving enrichment from this external contribution";
see his "L'image culturelle de la France au Japon," Dialogues et cultures 36
(199 2): 36-41.
28. Carpentier developed his famous theory of "10 real maravilloso" in the
preface to his novel El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of this World,
1949).
29. As a result of the Great Depression, whose effects were felt in Europe no less
than in America, the review's first issue (April 1931) was to be its last; see
Claude Cymerman and Claude FeIl, Histoire de la littérature hispano-américaine
de 1940 à nos jours (Paris: Nathan, 1997),47.
30. Mexican painter (1886-1957), renowned as one of his country's greatest
muralists.
31. Carpentier, "América ante la joven literatura europea," 56-57.
ton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 13 1.
33. See Mohammed Dib, "Le voleur de feu," in jean Amrouche: L'éterneljugurtha,
1906-1962, ed. Marc Faigre (Marseilles: Archives de la Ville de Marseille,
19 8 5).
34. It is in exacdy this way that the translations of Shakespeare into Swahili by
Julius Nyerere, the former president of Tanzania, are to be understood.
Nyerere's versions ofjulius Caesar (1963) and The Merchant of Venice (1969)
gave rise to a great many commentaries; see Pius Ngandu Nkashama, Lit-
tératures et écritures en langues africaÎ11es, 339-350.
Notes to Pages 23 0 - 235 1 387

35. See Antoine Berman, L'épreuve de l'étranger: Culture et traduction da/1s
l'Allemagne romantique (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 29.
36. Quoted in Fritz Strich, Goethe und die Weltliteratur (Bern: Franke Verlag,
1946), 18; emphasis added.
37· Quoted in ibid., 57; emphasis added.
38. Quoted in Winfried Sdun, Probleme und Theorien des Übersetzens in Deutsch-
land vom 18. bis zum 20.Jahrhundert (Munich: Max Hüber, 1967),25.
39. Walter Benjamin, "The Concept of Criticism," in Selected Writings, ed.
Marcus Bullock and Michael WJennings, 4 vols. to date (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1996-), 1:158.
40. See Berman, L'épreuve de l'étranger, 33.
41. Quoted in ibid., 92, 93.
42. August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Geschichte der klassischen Literatur, ed. Edgar
Lohner (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1964), 17; quoted in Berman, L'épreuve de
l'étranger, 62.
43. Quoted in Sdun, Probleme und Theorien, 27.
44. Sadegh Hedayat, ed., Les Chants d'Omar Khayam, édition critique, trans. M. F.
Farzaneh and Jean Malaplate (Paris:José Corti, 1993).
45. See M. F. Farzaneh, ed. and trans. (with F. Farzaneh), Rencontres avec Sadegh
Hedayat: Le parcours d'une initiation (Paris:José Corti, 1993), 8.
46. Sadegh Hedayet, La chouette aveugle, trans. Roger Lescot (Paris: José Corti,
1953). The book was written in India between 1935 and 1937 and privately
printed for friends, in a small run in Bombay, on its completion; it was th en
serialized in the newspaper Iran and finally published in Tehran in 1941.
47. YoussefIshaghpour, Le tombeau de Sadegh Hedayat (Paris: Fourbis, 1991), 14.
48. Ibid., 35.
49. There was a first German version of the Rubâiyât in 18 l 8 by the Austrian
philosopher Baron Josef von Hammer-Purgstall; then, in 1857, a French
prose version by the interpreter to the French Embassy in Persia, Jean-
Baptiste Nicolas, annotated by Théophile Gautier and Ernst Renan.
Khayyam's glory in the West dates from the publication in 1859 of Edward
Fitzgerald's English translation of seventy-five quatrains. Fitzgerald's version
enjoyed a great success among the pre-Raphaelites and remains one of the
classics of the English language. Many other translations were to follow, all
of which took liberties with the original manuscripts and poetical forms;
see Jean Malaplate's "Note sùr l'adaptation des Quatrains," in Hidayet's crit-
ical edition of the Rubâiyât, II5-II9.
50. Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Lift in Britain,
1850-1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991),359.
5 1. Quoted in ibid.
388 1 Notes to Pages 235-24°

52. Octavio Paz, In Search of the Present: 1990 Nobel Lecture, bilingual ed., trans.
Anthony Stanton (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990),8.
53. Carlos Fuentes, The Buried Mirror: Riflections on Spain and the New Vf/àrld
(Boston: Houghton Miffiin, 1992),9-10.
54. See Jacques Bouchard, "Une renaissance: La formation de la conscience
nationale chez les Grecs modernes," Études françaises 10, no. 4 (1974): 397-
410; also Mario Vitti, Histoire de la littérature grecque moderne (Paris: Hatier,
1989),185 if.
55. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in The Writings of Ger-
trude Stein, 19°3-1932, ed. Catherine Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (New
York: Library of America, 1998),739.
56. James Joyce, "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages," in The Critical Writings if
James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking,
1959),173·
57. Walt Whitman, "Mississippi Valley Literature," in Specimen Days, in Complete
Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Literary Classics of
the United States/Viking, 1982),866-867.
58. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, in ibid., 165, 167.
59. Whitman, "The Prairies and Great Plains of Poetry," in Specimen Days, 863.
60. Ramuz, Paris: Notes d'un Vaudois, 91; emphasis added.
61. Rubén Dario, Espaiia contemporémea (Paris: Garnier Hermanos, 1901),
quoted by Hilda Torres-Varela, "1910-1914 en Espagne," in L'année 1913:
Les jo rm es esthétiques de l'oeuvre d'art à la veille de la Première Guerre mondiale,
ed. Liliane Brion-Guerry, 2 vols. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971),2:1054.
62. Manuel Vazquez Montalban, interview with the author, March 1991.
63. See H. Gustav Klaus, "1984 Glasgow: Alasdair Gray, Tom Leonard, James
Kelman," Liber: Revue internationale des livres, no. 24 (October 1995): 12.
64. SeeJohn Kelly, "The Irish Review," in Brion-Guerry, L'année 1913,2:1028.
65. See ibid.
66. Very probably in 1898, when he was sixteen, and for reasons very similar to
those of Shaw.
67. See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press,
19 82 ),73.
68. See Jean-Michel Rabaté,james Joyce (Paris: Hachette, 1993),71-72.
69. The schedule announced in October 1901 included Casadh afZ tSûgâin, a
drama by Douglas Hyde written in Gaelic, and a play by Yeats and Moore
based on an Irish heroic legend, titled Diarmuid and Grâinne; see Ellmann,
James Joyce, 88.
70. Joyce, "The Day of the Rabblement," in Mason and Ellmann, Critical Writ-
ings, 69-70.

7I. James Joyce, "Ibsen's New Drama," ibid., 48.
72. Similarly, Catalonia and Quebec today serve as models and points of refer-
ence for each other.
73. Quoted in Françoise Lalande, Christian Dotremont, l'inventeur de Cobra: Une
biographie (Paris: Stock, I998), l I2.
74. Quoted in Richard Miller, Cobra (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Françaises,
I994),28.
75. Quoted in ibid., 49.
76. Quoted in ibid., 2I.
77. Quoted in ibid., I90.
9. The Tragedy of Translated Men

I. See Louis-Jean Calvet, La guerre des langues et les politiques linguistiques (Paris:
Payot, I987).
2. On the complexity of the linguistic situation in Francophone Africa and
its literary consequences, see Bernard Mouralis, Littérature et développement:
Essai sur le statut, la fonction et la représentation de la littérature négro-africaine
-d'expressionfrançaise (Paris: Honoré Champion, I98I), I3I-I47.
3. The term "translated men," it will be recalled, cornes from Salman Rushdie,
"Imaginary Homelands," in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-
1991 (London: Granta, I99I), I7.
4. Interview with AbdellâtifLaâbi, La quinzaine littéraire, no. 436 (I6-3 l March
I9 8 5): 51.
5. Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonisé, précédé de Portrait du colonisateur, with a
preface by Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: Corréa, I957), I26.
6. Quoted in Alain Ricard, Littératures d'Afrique noire: Des langues aux livres
(Paris: CNRS Éditions-Kartala, I995), I56. Couchoro became a citizen of
the neighboring country of Togo in I940.
7. Kateb Yacine, "Toujours la ruée vers l'or," in Le poète comme boxeur:
Entretiens, 1958--1989, ed. Gilles Carpentier (Paris: Seuil, I994), I32.
8. Nuruddin Farah, Maps (London: Picador, I986), I7I.
9. Nuruddin Farah, "Childhood of My Schizophrenia," Times Literary Supple-
ment, 23-29 November I990, I264.
IO. Anatole Riovallan, Littérature irlandaise contemporaine (Paris: Librarie Hach-
ette, I939), vii-viii.
II. See Njabulo Ndebele, Rediscovery if the Ordinary and Other Essays Gohannes-
burg: Ravan, I989).
I2. See, for example, Njabulo Ndebele, Fools and Other Stories Gohannesburg:
Ravan, I983).
13.Jean Arnrouche, "Colonisation et langage," in Un Algérien s'adresse aux

Français ou ['histoire de ['Algérie par les textes, ed. Tassadit Yacine (Paris: Awal-
L'Harmattan, I994), 332·
I4. Quoted by Mohammed Dib, "Le voleur de feu," inJean Amrouche: L'éternel
Jugurtha, 1906-1g62, ed. Marc Faigre (Marseilles: Archives de la Ville de Mar-
seille, I98S), IS; emphasis added.
IS. Arnrouche, "Colonisation et langage," 329.
I6. Ibid., IS-I7. Analysts of African literatures note, however, that in countries
that were subject to British colonial rule the relation of writers to the colo-
nial language generally seems less tense than in countries colonized by
France, and that the need to choose a literary language has been experi-
enced in a less dramatic way. ln leaving greater freedom to native peoples in
educational matters, insisting that local communities take responsibility for
their own education, British practice allowed an lslamic literature in Hausa
to develop in West Africa, for example, and in East Africa it encouraged
new work to be produced in Swahili. Even so, the situation cannot be char-
acterized in any simple way, and one finds many writers from former British
colonies who face difficult choices with regard to language. See Ricard,
Littératures d'Afrique noire, I52-I62.
I7. See Rushdie, "Imaginary Homelands," I5.
l 8. But also in France: see, for example,]anheinz ]ahn, Manuel de littérature négro-
africaine (Paris: Resma, I969), 229-230.
I9. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Robert Langbaum (New York: Sig-
net Classic, I964), act I, scene ii, SS.
20. Rachid Boudjedra, in an interview with the author (November I99I), char-
acterized Algerian literature as a whole-notwithstanding certain great ex-·
ceptions such as Kateb Yacine-as a "literature of schoolteachers." This in-
terview was subsequently published as "Entretien avec Rachid Boudjedra,"
Liber, no. I7 (March 1994): 11-I4.
21. Salman Rushdie, "'Commonwealth Literature' Does Not Exist," in Imagi-
nary Homelands, 69-70. Rushdie also emphasizes that the hegemony ofEng-
lish, now the "international language," is no longer only-and perhaps not
even prirnarily-a consequence of the British heritage. It is also the lan-
guage of the United States, now the most powerful country in the world.
This ambiguity makes it possible for former colonies to escape exclusive
British domination and sustains the ambivalent relation between the Eng-
lish language as the language used by the English and as the language used
by much of the world-between a new literature produced by "translated
men" and a denationalized international culture.
22. Ibid., 70.
23. Rushdie, "Irnaginary Homelands," I7.
Notes to Pages 262-265 1 39I

24. Rushdie, '''Commonwealth Literature' Does not Exist," 64.
25. See Ricard, Littératures d)Afrique noire) especially I51-I72.
26. See Bernard Magnier, "Entretien avec Ahmadou Kourouma," Notre librairie)
April-June I987.
27. In the literary magazine Cahiers de Barbarie) edited by Jean Amrouche and
Armand Guibert.
28. Hova is the written language of the Merina, a people of ancient Indonesian
ancestry who occupied the high plateau of the island's interior and were the
dominant kingdom of Madagascar in the nineteenth century.
29. See Jean Paulhan, Les Hain-teny mérinas: Poésies populaires malgaches (Paris:
p. Geuthner, I913). [Originaily a means of resolving lawsuits, the oral genre
of hain teny ("science of words") was marked by improvised dialogue be-
tween two opponents or, by metaphorical extension, quarreling lovers.-
Trans.]
30. Boudjedra, "Entretien," I4.
3 I. The General Union (Bund) of JewishWorkers in Lithuania, Poland, and
~ussia was an organization of revolutionary Jewish workers founded in
I897 in Vilna; independent of the Mencheviks and Boisheviks, and opposed
to the Zionist movement, which it saw as a "romantic" fonn of bourgeois
nationalism, it played an important role before and du ring the Russian Rev-
olution of I9 l 7, after which it was repressed.-Trans.
32. An informaI group of German Jewish writers and artists led by Max Broad
whose inner circle included Felix Weltsch, Oskar Baum, and (after Kafka's
death) Ludwig Winter. Among the peripheral members were Ernst Weiss,
Rudolf Fuchs, Willy Hass, and Hermann Ungar.-Trans.
33. The term "anti-Zionist" is used here exclusively in connection with the in-
ternaI debates of Jewish nationalist movements at the beginning of the
twentieth century-debates that opposed Zionists and Bundists-and the
historical context surrounding them.
34. Thus the French tide of this work: see Claude David, "'Notice' de
VAmérique [V oublié] ," in his edition of Franz Kafka, Oeuvres complètes) trans.
Alexandre Vialatte, 3 vols. (Gallimard: I976-84), I:8I1. A more literaI ren-
dering of the German would be "The Missing Person," which is to say, as
David notes, someone of whom ail trace has been lost.-Trans.
35. Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends) Family and Editors) trans. Richard and Clara
Winston (New York: Schocken, I977), 288-289. In the German text Kafka
distinguishes three ways of appropriating the German language: the appro-
priation may be openly admitted ~aut)) or tacit (stillschweigend)) or else
achieved only at the cost of an internal struggle amounting to mental tor-
ture for the writer (selbstquèilerisch).
392 1 Notes to Pages 265-2 73

36. Franx Kafka, Diaries) ed. Max Brod, trans.Joseph Kresh and Martin Green-
berg, 2 vols. (New York: Schocken, l 948-49), I: II I.
37. Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, I99 0 ), 54.
38. Note the distinction made by Daniel Baggioni between "normalization,"
defined as "establishment of a norm . . . concerning the symbolic cap-
italization necessary for creating a consensus that will allow its diffusion and
adoption;' and "standardization," which has to do with "the work of lan-
guage professionals, grammarians, philologists, writers, and so on"; Langues
et nations en Europe (Paris: Payot, I997), 9I.
39. Ricard, Littératures d) Ajrique noire) II 8.
40. Kikuyu is not the national language of Kenya, which in 197I declared Swa-
hili the sole official language, a distinction that until then had been shared
with English.
4I. From an edited version of a talk originally given by Ngugi wa Thiong'o at
the Kenya Press Club, Nairobi, on I7 July 1979 and reprinted as "Return to
the Roots: Language, Culture and Politics in Kenya," in Writers in PoUtics: A
Reengagement with Issues if Literature and Society, ed. James Currey, rev. ed.
(Portsmouth: Heinemann, I997), 58.
42. Rushdie, "'Commonwealth Literature' Does Not Exist," 62-63.
43. Ricard, Littératures d)AjYique noire) 148.
44. Or a "diglossia" in the sense given this term by sociolinguists; see Baggioni,
Langues et nations en Europe) 55.
45. Henrik Stangerup, The Seducer: It 1s Hard to Die in Dieppe) trans. Sean Martin
(New York: Marion Boyars, I990), I99.
ton: Princeton University Press, I995), I05-106.
47. Howard S. Becker, introduction to ibid., xxi.
48. E. M. Cioran, "Lettre à Bacur Tincu, 29 décembre 1973," quoted in Gabriel
Liiceanu, Itinéraires d)une vie: E. M. Cioran) suivi de (ILes continents de l'in-
somnie)): Entretien avec E. M. Cioran (Paris: Michalon, I995), 30.
49. 1 have already noted that a relatively autonomous "national" space may be
formed and unified in the absence of a state in the strict political sense of
the term. In certain politically dependent regions that have a strong indige-
nous cultural tradition and within which forces of cultural and political na-
tionalism (or movements aimed at achieving political independence) have
grown up, as in lreland at the end of the nineteenth century, and in Cata-
lonia and Martinique today, one may speak of the emergence of a relatively
autonomous literary space.
50. Juan Benet, Otono en Madrid hacia 1950 (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1987),38-40.

SI. Milan Kundera, "La parole de Kundera," Le Monde, 24 September 1993, 44.
52. They are exceptions because there political independence was proclaimed
not by the colonized but by the colonists, as a consequence of which the re-
lation of the present-day residents of these areas to the languages they speak
is not one of subjection or imposition but of "legitimate" inheritance.
53. The partIy national struggle of Egyptian writers during this period to
introduce literary and linguistic realism-so-called dialectal and popular
Arabie, until then restricted to the production of a second-class literature-
as against the overrefinement of the c1assicallanguage among aesthetes, can
be described in exactly the same terms and according to the same logic.
54. Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, Éloge de la
créolité/ln Praise cf Creoleness, bilingual ed. (Paris: Gallimard; Baltimore:Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1990), 80.
55. Quoted in Mario Carelli andWalnice Nogueira Galvao, Le roman brésilien:
Une littérature anthropophage au XXe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1995), 60.
56. Mario de Andrade, Macunaima, trans. E. A. Goodland (New York: Random
House, 1984), 108.
57. Notable among those who carne before is José de Alencar (1829-1877), to
whom Andrade dedicated Macuna{ma and who had sought to promote a
Brazilian language; see Carelli and Galvao, Le roman brésilien, IO-II.
58. Already in the 1940S the ethnologist Roger Bastide had suggested a paral-
lel between Macuna{ma and the enterprise of the Pléiade: see his article
"Macuna{ma visto por um francês," Revista do Arquivo municipal (Sao Paulo),
no. 106 Oanuary 1946).
59. Oswald de Andrade, "Manifesto da poesia Pau-·Brasil," in Do Pau-Brasil a
Antropcifagia e as Utopias, vol. 6 of Ob ras completas (Rio de Janeiro: Civilizaçao
Brasileira, 1972), 7.
60. Quoted by Gilles Lapouge in his preface to Mario de Andrade, L'apprenti
touriste, trans. Monique Le Moing and Marie-Pierre Mazéas (Paris: La
Quinzaine Littérarie-Louis Vuitton, 1996), 13.
6I. See Mario Carelli, "Les Brésiliens à Paris de la naissance du romantisme aux
avant-gardes," in Le Paris des étrangers: Depuis un siècle, ed. André Kaspi and
Antoine Marès (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1989),287-298.
62. From Andrade's third letter to Alberto de Oliveira, quoted in Carelli and
Galvao, Le roman brésilien, 53.
63. From Andrade's letter to Manuel Bandeira, quoted in ibid.
64. Andrade, Macunaima, 80.
65. Ibid., 78.
66. Samuel Beckett, "Dante ... Bruno. Vico ... Joyce," in Our Exagmination
394 1 Notes to Pages 282'-287

Round His Factfficatiotlfor Incarnination of VVork in Progress (Paris: Shakespeare
& Co., 1929), 30.
67. Mario de Andrade, 0 turista aprendeiz (Sào Paulo: Libraria Duas Cidades/
Seeretaria de Cultura, Ciêneia e Technologia, 1976), 2°7.
68. Theodor Koeh-Grünberg, Varn Roroima zurn Orinoco: My th en und Legenden
der Taulipang und Arekuna Indianern (Stuttgart: Strecker und Schroeder,
1924). See Telê Porto Aneona Lopez, "Macounaïrna et Mario de Andrade,"
in Macounaïma, ed. Pierre Rivas (Paris: Stock, 1996),242-243.
69. Mario de Andrade, letter to Souza de Oliveira (26 April 1935), quoted by
Michel Riaudel, "Toupi or not toupi: Une aporie de l'être national," in
ibid., 300. Andrade thus opposed regionalist literature, which had been very
important in Brazil since the end of the nineteenth century.
70. Quoted in ibid., 301.
71. A bit later Joào Guimaràes Rosa (1908-1967) was to proceed in a very simi-
lar fashion, in his stories and especially in his great novel, Grande sertao:
Veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, 1956), decisively enriching the
national Brazilian vocabulary through his inexhaustible enumeration of
terms referring to the flora and fà.una of the sertao.
72. Andrade, Maamaima, 28.
73. Joachim du Bellay, The Defence and Illustration if the French Language, trans.
Gladys M. Turquet (London:]. M. Dent and Sons, 1939),95.
74. See Riaudel, "Toupi or not toupi," 290.
7 5· Quoted by Pierre Rivas, "Réception critique de Macounaïrna en France," in
Rivas, Macounaïrna, 3 15.
76. Conversely, Andrade's fellow countryman Oswald de Andrade, who made
many trips to Paris, sought to make himselfknown and to arrange for trans-
lation of his work. He managed to meet Larbaud-despite the warnings of
Mathilde Pomès, who regarded Latin Americans as "people thirsting for
European fame"-and, in addition to his own work (which, however, re-
mained untranslated), acquainted Larbaud with modern Brazilian writing. It
is known that he gave Larbaud a volume of the works of the great nine--
teenth-century Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis. See Béatrice Mousli,
valery Larbaud (Paris: Flammarion, 1998),378.
77. Quoted in Riaudel, "Toupi or not toupi," 304.
78. Andrade, Macunaima, 13.
79. Pierre Rivas, "Modernisme et primitivisme dans Macounaïrna," in Rivas,
Macounaïma, l l .
80. Quoted in ibid.
81. See Angela McRobbie, "Wet, wet, wet," Liber: Revue internationale des livres,
no. 24 (October 1995): 8-r 1.

82. Ernest Hemingway, The Green Hills ofAftica (New York: Scribner, 1935), 22.
83. Quoted in Duncan McLean, "James Kelman lnterviewed," Edinburgh Re-
view 71 (1985): 77.
84. See Alfredo Almeida,jorge Amado: Politica e literatura (Rio de Janeiro: Cam-
pus, 1979).
85 . .Jorge Amado, Conversations avec Alice Ra il/a rd (Paris: Gallimard, 1990),38,
20; emphasis added.
86. Ibid., 42-43.
87. Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant, Éloge de la créolité/ln Praise of
Creoleness) 102.
88. Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, Raison d)être (Paris: La Différence, 1991), 56.
89. The difierence in status between creole French, claimed to be a "language"
by its defenders, and the Vaudois dialect (or "patois") can be one only of
degree of independence in relation to the norms of French.
90. Ramuz, Raison d)être) 55.
9I. Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant, Éloge de la créolitélIn Praise of
Creoleness) 105 [translation slightly modified].
92. Ibid., 76.
93. Ibid., 95-98; emphasis added.
94. Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, letter to Paul Claudel (22 April 1925), quoted
in Jérôme Meizoz, "Le droit de mal écrire;' Actes de la recherche en sciences
sociales) nos. II 1-1 I2 (March 1996): 106.
95. In much the same way the Danish novelist Henrik Stangerup, in The Se-
ducer, made his literary and historical hero M0ller a literary critic who set
out for Paris in search of the "Danish tone" in order to found a new Dan-
ish literature, freed from the yoke of German domination.
96. Ramuz, Raison d)être) 64.
97. Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant, Éloge de la créolité/ln Praise of
Creoleness) 102.
98. Ibid., 100.
99. Ibid., 96 [translation slightly modified].
lOO. Ramuz, Raison d)être) 66.
101. Ibid., 67. This last sentence may be read as a vow to make the pays vaudois a
simple de tour on the road to Paris, which is to say to universality.
I02. Ibid., 68-69; emphasis added.
103. Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant, Éloge de la créolitélIn Praise of
Creoleness) 102, I I I - I I 5 [translation slightly modified].
104. Ramuz, Raison d)être) 43; emphasis added.
105. Pour ou contre C.-F Ramuz: Cahier des témoignages (Paris: Éditions du Siècle,
1926).

10. The Irish Paradigm
1. Irish literary space has the additional and rare distinction of combining ev-
ery form of domination. Like all European literatures it was from the begin-
ning relatively well endowed with resources, while at the same time exhib-
iting all the characteristics of economic and cultural colonization.
2. Bourdieu's notion of "progressive autonomization" (as the term is ritually
translated in English) is developed in several essays; see particularly The Field
of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 52-55
and II2-114.-Trans.
3. See Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 1-8.
4. Lady Gregory was to publish her Cuchulain ofMuirthemne in 1902. The leg-
end of Deirdre was adapted for the stage by Yeats, .lE, and Synge; James
Stephens gave a narrative version of it.
5. This play associated the legendary figure of Cathleen, the symbol of Ireland,
and the memory of the French landing at Killala in 1798.
6. Kiltartan, a dialect of English that preserves Elizabethan and Jacobean
archaicisms as well as underlying Gaelic turns of phrase, is the speech of the
peasants of County Galway, the home of Lady Gregory. See Robert Welch,
ed., The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1996),226.
7.W. B. Yeats, "The Irish Dramatic Movement, Samhain 1902," in The Col-
lected VVOrks of William Butler Yeats (Stratford-on-Avon: A. H. Bullen/Shake-
speare Head Press, 1908),102-103; idem, The Celtic TIvilight (London: A. H.
Bullen, 1902),232-233.
8. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland) 133.
9. James Joyce, "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages," in TIte Critical Writings of
James Joyce) ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking,
1959),155-156 .
10. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland) 155.
II. See John Kelly, "The Irish Review," in L'année 1913: Les formes esthétiques de
l)oeuvre d)art à la veille de la Première Guerre mondiale) ed. Liliane Brion-
Guerry, 2 vols. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971), 2:1024. See also Luke Gibbons,
"Constructing the Canon: Versions of National Identity," in Seamus Deane,
Andrew Carpenter, and Jonathan Williams, eds., The Field Day Anthology of
Irish Writing) 3 vols. (Lawrence Hill, Derry, Northern Ireland: Field Day,
199 1),3:950-955.
12. From Françoise Morvan's introduction to her edition of]. M. Synge, Théâtre
(Paris: Babel, 1996), 16-17.
13.]. M. Synge, "1907 Preface to The Playboy of the Western VVOrld)" in Robin
Notes to Pages 3°4-3 11 1 397

Skelton, ed.,j M. Synge: Collected TiVorks, 4 vols. (London: Oxford University
Press, I962-I968), 2:53-54.
I4. Born John Casey, he Gaelicized his first name (Sean) and his patronymic
(O'Casey) in order to identify and integrate himself more completely with
the nationalist struggle.
l 5. See in particular the section "A Terrible Beauty is Borneo," in In ishjà lien ,
Fare Thee liVell (New York: Macmillan, I949), 2I9-222.

I6. Quoted in Sean O'Casey, Rose and Crown (London: Macmillan, I952), 4I-
42 .
I7. G. B. Shaw, letter to Sylvia Beach (II June I92I), quoted in Richard
Ellmann,jamesjoyce (New York: Oxford University Press, I982), 506-507.
I8. See Richard Ellmann's preface to "An Irish Poet," in Mason and Ellmann,
Critical Writings, 84.
I9. James Joyce, "The Soul ofIreland,' in ibid., I04.
20. James Joyce, "The Day of the Rabblement," in ibid., 71.
21. See Alessandro Francini-Bruni, joyce intimo spogliatto in paizza (Trieste:
Editoriale Libraria, I922); quoted in Ellmann,james joyce, 226.
22. James Joyce, letter to Grant Richards (5 May 1906), quoted in "An Irish
Poet," 85, n. 5.
23. See Joyce, "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages," 172-I74.
24· Joyce, "An Irish Poet," 85.
25· Joyce, "The Day of the Rabblement," 70-71.
26. Among the reasons for Joyce's prolonged exile (and that of many other Irish
artists), one must not neglect the Catholic censorship established in Ireland
after I921, which imposed very strict aesthetic norms and moral prohibi-
tions upon artists.
27. Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (New York: Macmillan, I948), 30, 58.
28. Interview with Seamus Heaney in Libération, 24 November 1988.
29. In Bourdieu's terms, used by the author here and elsewhere, Beckett occu-
pied the same "positions" and exhibited the same "dispositions" that Joyce
had; see the discussion of these concepts in The Field of Cultural Production,
61-73.-Trans.
30. Samuel Beckett, "German Letter of 1937," in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings
and a Dramatie Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London:John Calder, 1983), 52-
53·
3 1. Arnong recent studies in this direction, see in particular Jinos Riesz, "La
notion de champ littérarire appliquée à la littérature togoloise," in Le champ
littéraire togolais, ed. Jinos Riesz and Alain Ricard (Bayreuth: E. Breitinger/
Universitat Bayreuth, 1991), 11-20.
32. Of the many studies that rely solely on the uncertain notion of "influence"
398 1 Notes to Pages 311 -320

in seeking to relate writers in Irish literary space to one another, see, for ex-
ample, Martha Fodaski Black, Shaw and Joyce: The Last f1IOrd in Stolmtelling
(Gainesville: University Press ofFlorida, 1995).
33. Edward Said, "Yeats and Decolonization," in Nationalism, Colonialism, and
Literature, ed. Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said (Minnea-
polis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 69.
34. Fredric Jameson, "Modernism and Imperialism," in ibid., 45.
35. See Said, "Yeats and Decolonization," 73.
36. See Enda Duffy, The Subaltern Ulysses (Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1994).
37. Edward Said, Culture and lmperialism (New York: Knopf, 1994), 8.
38. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 6,5.
11. The Revolutionaries

1. Carlos Fuentes, "Ha Muerto la novela?" in Geografia de la novela (Mexico
City: Fondo de Cultura Econ6mica, 1993), 27.
2. Quoted in Claude Cymerman and Claude Feil, Histoire de la littérature his-
pano-américaine de 1940 à nos jours (Paris: Nathan, 1997), 13'-14. On the term
"cronopio," see Cortazar's novel Historias de cronopios y defamas (1962).
3. Octavio Paz, ln Search of the Present: 1990 Nobel Lecture, bilingual ed., trans.
Anthony Stanton (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), 16, 19.
4. Here l propose only a very partial study of a few heretical genealogies. To
this list would have to be added in particular the name ofJorge Luis Borges,
recognized as a mas ter by a great many novelists both in the center and on
the periphery (among them Danilo Kis).
5. See the chapter "Usages politiques et littéraires de Dante" in Pascale Casa-
nova, Beckett l'abstracteur: Anatomie d'une révolution littéraire (Paris: Seuil,
1997),64-80 .
6. Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), Neapolitan historian, jurist, and philoso-
pher who used a comparative method to study the formation, development,
and decline of nations, served as a sort of substitute for Herder for writers
and inteilectuals distant from the Germanie cultural area.
7. The notion that there is an affinity between the two writers, or even that
Joyce exerted any influence upon Schmidt, is continually denied by critics.
Relying on statements made by the German writer, who rightly refused to
be regarded-as commentators on his work insisted-as a mere imitator,
they thus succeed only in obeying one of the tacit laws of the literary world,
namely, that an author cannot be declared great unless he demonstrates total
originality, which is to say unless he qualifies for a certificate of historical
virginity.

8. Arno Schmidt, excerpt from letter to Ernst Krawehl, 3 March I963, quoted
in Schmidt, Der Briefwechsel mit Aljred Andersch, vol. l of Arno-Schmidt-
Briqèdition (Zurich: Haffillans Verlag, I986), 224 (note to letter 235).
9· Arno Schmidt, Seenes Jrom the Life of a Faun, in Collected Barly Fiction, 1949-
1964, 4 vols., trans. John E. Woods (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, I994-
I997),2:I9·
IO. Arno Schmidt, Calculations III, trans. Freidrich Peter Ott, in Review of Con-
temporary Fiction 8 (spring I988): 88.
II. Ibid., 72.
I2. Arno Schmidt, Calculations 1, in ibid., 55; idem, Scenesjrom the Lijè ofa Faun,
trans.John E. Woods (London: Marion Boyars, I983), 93.
I3. Arno Schmidt, Brand's Heath, in Collected Barly Fiction, 2:II5.
I4. James Joyce, "The Day of the Rabblement," in The Critical Writings ojJames
Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, I959),
69-7 0 .
I5. Schmidt, Scenesjrom the Life of a Faun, trans. Woods (Boyars edition), 9-IO.
I6. Henry Roth, From Bondage (New York: St. Martin's, I996), 62,64.
I7.-Roth himselffigures as a character in From Bondage, under the name of Ira
Stigman.
I8. Ibid., 73-75; emphasis added.
I9. The Yiddish expression for someone who is an expert, a connoisseur, which
has given English the word "maven."-Trans.
20. Roth, From Bondage, 76-77; emphasis added.
2I. Ibid., 74.
22. From Larbaud's preface to William Faulkner, Tandis que j'agonise, trans.
Maurice-Edgar Coindreau (Paris: Gallimard, I934), i.
23.Juan Benet, interview with the author, October I987.
24. The assertion of stylistic kinship and sirnilarity between Benet's work and
that of Claude Simon, for example, which no French reader could fail to
note and which was emphasized by the jacket copy of Éditions de Minuit,
their common publisher, are in fact the result of an error of perspective and
Francocentric interpretation. Benet insisted on his unfamiliarity with the
nouveau roman, and his lack of interest in it, when he was starting out as a
writer: "No, the nouveau roman wasn't that important for me. It was reading
William Faulkner that really awakened me to aIl the possibilities of writing.
After him, of course, I read the French novelists of the nouveau roman, and
the German, English, South American writers, but [by then] I was already
too mature and too far along in writing my books to feel the influence of
these authors" (interview with the author, October I987). Rather, a certain
state of the novel, combined with the existence of an international liter-
ary culture, was capable of producing quite similar projects in different

places and contexts. Claude Simon, for his part, was a self-proclaimed de-
scendant of Faulkner as well.
25.Juan Benet, interview with the author,July 1991.
26. Valery Larbaud, preface to Faulkner, Tandis que j'agonise, ii.
27. Benet even went so far as to embed phrases from Faulkner in his own
fictional texts. Thus he refers, for example, to "the barking 'unreal, sono-
rous, and regular, stamped by that sad and resigned desolation' with which
the dogs were calling to each other"; Return to Region, trans. Gregory
Rabassa (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985),265.
28. Preface to William Faulkner, Les palmiers sauvages, trans. Maurice-Edgar
Coindreau (Paris: Gallimard, 1952),4, 5.
29. Benet, Return to Region, 3-4.
30. Ibid., 76.
31. Ibid., 202.
32. Ibid., 63, 64.
33. In "Tres Fechas: Sobre la estrategia en la Guerra Civil espaiiola;' in La
construccion de la torre de Babel (Madrid: Siruela, 1990), 85-II6, Benet speaks
of the "theoretical backwardness" ofSpanish military leaders.
34. Benet, Return to Region, 201 [translation slightly modified].
35. Rachid Boudjedra, interview with the author, November 1991, published as
"Entretien avec Rachid Boudjedra," Liber, no. 17 (March 1994): 13.
36. Ibid., 13, II, 12,14.
37. Kateb Yacine, interview with Mireille Djaider and K. Nekkouri-Khelladi, 4
April 1975, published as "Le génie est collectif," in Kateb Yacine: Éclats de
mémoire, ed. Olivier Corpet and Albert Dichy (Paris: IMEC Éditions, 1994),
61-62.
38. Mario Vargas Llosa, Sobre la vida y la po[{tica: Diazogo con vargas Llosa, ed.
Ricardo A. Setti (Buenos Aires: Editorial Intermundo, 1989), 17-18.
39. Along with the majority of Latin American novelists today, mention must
be made of Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant, as well as Édouard
Glissant, all of whom daim kinship with Faulkner and membership in the
community of the "American creole novel," as Chamoiseau described it in
my September 1992 interview with him.
40. Katalin Molnar, "Dlalang," Revue de littérature générale, February 1996.
41. The phonetic portion of Molnar's original text reads: "Le but a été atteint,
tou, absolumantou sèksprim danlélang jadis vulguèr . . . écéla justeman
ouçafoir ôjourd'hui avèklalitératur ... Par conséquent, ils peuvent utiliser
n'importe quel procédé, réaliser tout ce qui est réalisable, tou, absoluman
toutépermi! "-Trans.
42. Samuel Beckett, "German Letter of 1937," in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings
and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London:John Calder, 1983), 53.
Notes to Pages 338-347 1 4°1

Conclusion
1. Samuel Beckett, Le monde et le pantalon (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1989),8-
9·
2. Roland Barthes, "Histoire ou littérature," in Sur Racine (Paris: Seuil, I963),
145-167.
3. Ibid., 148.
4. Marc Fumaroli, Trois institutions littéraires (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), xii.
5. Antoine Compagnon, Le démon de la théorie: Littérature et sens commun (Paris:
Seuil, 1998),239.
6. Barthes, "Histoire ou littérature," 148.
7. Beckett, Le monde et le pantalon, 33, ro--r I.
8. See Lucien Febvre, "Littérature et vie sociale. De Lanson à Daniel Mornet:
Un renoncement?" Annales d'histoire économique et sociale 13, no. 3 (1941).
9· Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Pas t, trans. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff,
Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor, 3 vols. (New York: Random House,
r9 8r ),3: n0 4·
IO. Ibid., 1098-99.
l 1. -Throughout the text, where l have spoken of a writer's "career" in prefer-
ence to literaI renderings of itinéraire or trajectoire, terms often found in the
French text, it will of course be understood that the reference is not to his
or her occupation, or to a reputation determined by critics or other literary
authorities, but, in keeping with the root sense of the English word and
with the author's own conceptions, the path and passage of a writer through
literary space and literary time.-Trans.
12. Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, I089.

Index
Abbey Theatre, 192,249,306,3°7,3 l 1,312, American, El Gournal), JI

316,333 Americanism, 204
Abt, Thomas, 236 Amharic language, 259, 260
Académie Française, 59,66,74 Amiel, Henri-Frédéric, 348
Achebe, Chinua, IlO, 156, I95-196, 258. Amrouche,]ean, 262, 272
WORKS: Things FaU Apart, I96 Amsterdam, 1 l, 251
Action Culturelle des Travailleurs (Workers' Andersch, Alfred, 33 I
Cultural Action), 230 Andersen, Hans Christian, 99
Addison,]oseph,73 Anderson, Benedict, 35, 47, 48, 75,84
Ady, Endre, 28, I34, 36Irl50 Andrade, Carlos Drummond de, 148,234
JE. See Russell, George Andrade, Mario de, 45,124,227,258,284-292,
Africa, II, 32, 79, 80, 136, 338; Anglophone, 295,355, 395n69· WORKS: Macuna{ma, 227,
I 17, 39IrlI6; construction ofliterary heri- 28 4-292,295,296
tage, 226-228; Francophone, 1 I 7, 390n2, Andrade, Oswald de, 32, 285, 395n76. WORKS:
391nI6; Irish literature and, 323; Lusophone Cannibalistic Manifesto (Manifèsto antropéifago),
(Portuguese·-speaking), I23-124; regional di- 285; Manifèsto of Brazilwood Poetry (Manifesto
alects in, 274; unwritten languages of, 256 da poesia Pau-Brasil) , 285
African National Congress, 268 Anglicanism, 50
Afrikaans language, 268-269 Anglo-Irish Protestants, 190,248,305
Alas, Leopoldo (Clarin), I02 Anglophone area, Il7, 263
Albania,80 Angola, 123, I24
Alcayaga, Lucila Godoy. See Mistral, Gabriela Antoine, André, 137, I60, I6I, 162, 374n24
Alegria, Ciro, 94 Antunes, Antonio Lobo, 95,166, 377n57
Alencar,]osé de, 394n57 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 28,57,134
Alfred, king ofWessex, 240 Appel, Karel, 25I
Algeria, 226-227, 229, 230-23 I, 262, 264, 267- Arabic language, 230, 231, 256,260,262,267-
268,27 2,3 09,342-344 268,27 2 ,27 6 ,342 ,343
Allen, Woody, 167 Aran Islands (Ireland), 306
Alves, Antônio de Castro, 32 Archer, William, 159, 163
Amado,]orge, 148,295,313. WORKS: Cacao Archipenko, Alexander, I26
(Cacâu),295 Argentina, 143, 144
Art Moderne, L' Gournal), 132 WORKS: Cap au pire, 347;
Asia, II,79,80 "Dante".Bruno.Vico...]oyce," 287,329; End-
Asturias, Miguel Angel, 153,234,325 game (Lafin de partie), 141; The Expelled
Athens, 27, 247 (L'Expulsé), 141; First Love (Premier amour),
Atwood,Margaret, 122, 123 141; Malone Dies (Malone meurt), 141; Mercier
Augustus Caesar, 66, 70 and Carnier (Mercier et Camier), 141; Molloy,
Austen,]ane, 121,321 142, 375n38; More Pricks than Kicks, 141;
Auster, Paul, 166, 169 "The Painting of the Van Velde Brothers; or
Australia, 117, 118 The World and the Trousers" ("La peinture
Austria, 84, Il5, II7 des Van Velde; ou Le Monde et le
Austro-Hungarian Empire, 117,200,250-25 l, pantalon"), 127-128,348; "Recent Irish Po-
2 69 etry," 187-188; Suite, 141; Texts jàr Notlzing
Azûa, Felix de, 113, 264 (Textes pour rierl) , 141, 375n38; The Unname-
able (L'Innommable), 141; Waitingfor Godot
Babylon,27 (En attendant Godot), 141; Watt, 141, 375n37;
Baggioni, Daniel, 74,80, 365Il25, 366n47 Worstward Ho, 347
Bahr, Hermann, 102. WORKS: The Overcoming if Beijing, 247
Naturalism (Die Überwindung des Belges,]ean Lemaire de, 46,52. WORKS: The
Naturalismus),102 Harmony of the Two Languages (La concorde des
Balcells, Carmen, 246 deux langages), 46,52
Balkans, 78 Belgium, 84, 115, 117, 131-133,188,205-206,
Balzac, Honoré de, 25, 26, 27. WORKS: Lost Illu- 212-2 13; challenge to Paris, 25 1-253; as
sions (Illusions perdues), 26; Le Père Goriot, 26; model of small countries, 248, 250
Splendors and Miseries if Courtesarzs Belgrade, 114,129
(Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes), 26 Bellay,]oachim du, 9, 46, 47,51,52,53-54,58,
Bancroft, George, 78 66,235,285; call to enrich French language,
Bandeira, Manuel, 286 289; dominance of Latin and, 220, 221;
Banville, Théodore de, 223 Herderian revolution and, 224;]oyce and
Barbey d'Aurevilly,]ules-Amédée, 19 Beckett compared with, 330; on Latin en-
Barcelona, 25,164,206,245-247,278 richment with Greek, 45; recasting of Latin
Baroja, Pio, 279-280 into French, 232; on "slavish" imitation of
Barral, Carlos, 246 ancient texts, 255; successors to, 60; tradition
Barrault,]ean-Louis, 131, 143 of eccentric writers and, 355. WORKS: T7le
Barthes, Roland, 197,348-349,35°,3 5I. DEifèrlse and Illustration of the Frer/ch Language
WORKS: "History or Literature", 349 (La diffence et illustration de la langt~e Jrançoyse) ,
Bastide, Roger, 365n2o, 394n58 45,46,47,48,51,52-53,54,58,9°, I04, 176,
Baudelaire, Charles, 25, 26, 28, 91, 97,134,143, 221,233,355
265,266. WORKS: Petits poèmes en prose, 28; Le Bembo, Pietro, 56, 363n77. WORKS: Essays on
spleen de Paris, 26 the Vernawlar Language (Prose della volgar Zin-
Bauhaus, 252 gua),5 6
Baum, Oskar, 392n32 Benet,]uan, 41, IOO, II2, Il4, 176,206,326,
Beach, Sylvia, 145, 313,317,334 328,333,354, 37In47, 37 2n 53; on anachro-
Becker, Howard, 277-278 nism, III; on attraction of Paris, 28-29;
Beckett, Samuel, 4, 34, 41, 46,55,110,146,206, Faulkner and, 338-342, 400n24, 40 In 27; on
321,354, 398n29; alternating between lan- national writers, 279-280; on politicallitera-
guages, 28 1; as autonomous writers, 3 l 8- ture, 197-198; on translations, 107. WORKS:
320; consec~ated in French, 140-142; on Herrumbrosas Lanzas, 340; Return ta Region
consecration, 127~128; Dante and, 329-330; (Volveras a Region), 340-342
French language adopted by, 258; on Ireland, Benjamin, Walter, 25, 236. WORKS: The Arcades
183; on Irish poetry, 187-188; literary lan- Projeet (Das Passagen- VVerk) , 25
guage and, 346--347; Nobel Prize and, 153. Béranger, Pierre-Jean de, 32
404 1 Index
Berber folktales, 226 355. WORKS: Aesthetic Studies (/Esthetiske
Berlin, 18,71, II7, 138, 177,269 Studier), 159; Eminent Authors of the Nifle-
Berlin, Isaiah, 38 teet/th Century (Det Modeme Gejennembruds
Berman, Antoine, 14 Maend) , 98; Main Currents in Nineteenth-Cen-
Bernabé,Jean, 283, 296, 297, 298,300 tury Literature (Hovedstromninger i det nittende
Bernhard, Thomas, 166, 167 Aarhundredes Litteratur), 98
Beverloo, Cornelius van, 251 Brandys, Kazimierz, 207
Bible, 49-50, 74, 346nI l, 364 n 7, 375n40 Brant, Sebastian, 363n77
"Bibliothèque de Kultura" series, 144 Braudel, Fernand, 4,10,12,47,49,83, I17
Bib6, Istvan, 181 Brazil, 62, 84, 85, 123-124, 180,227,277-278,
Bjerke-Petersen, Vilhelm, 252. WORKS: Symbols 283,3°9; literary rivalry in, 294-296; mod-
in Abstract Art (Symboler i abstrakt Kunst), ernism in, 284-292
252 Bréchon, Robert, 2I4
Bj0rnson, Bj0rns~erne, 98 Brecht, Bertolt, 167
Bjurstrom, Carl, 137 Breton, André, 232, 251-252, 279
Blanc, Louis, 32 Brink, André, 268-269. WORKS: Looking on
Blanqui, Louis Auguste, 25 Darkness (Kennis van die Aand), 269
Blin, Roger, 141 British Empire, 12I, 209-210, 21 l, 250, 3'12n72,
Boccaccio, Giovanni, 49,56 391nI6. See also England; Great Britain
Boccioni, Umberto, 126 Brod, Max, 201, 254, 271, 272
Boileau, Nicolas, 66 Bruni, Leonardo, 49
Bokméil (book language), 158,274 Brunot, Ferdinand, 64
Boli, Heinrich, 167, 331 Brussels, 131-133, 373nI3
Bolster's Magazine, 221 Buber, Martin, 143
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 38 Bucharest, 184,278,281
Bondy, François, 376n44 Buck, Pearl, 151
Booker Prize, 120, 121 Budry, Paul, 217
Bookman Uournal), 187 Buenos Aires, 19,96,97,143
Book of Common Prayer, 74 Bulgaria, 80
Borges,]orge Luis, 97,101, I28, 134,135,241, Bulgarian language, 78, 274
280, 325,399n4 Bundism, 269, 270, 392nn]I,33
Bossuet,]acques-Bénigne,69 Burdy, Samuel, 221
Bouchet, André du, 281 Burroughs, William, 129. WORKS: Naked Lunch,
Boudjedra, Rachid, I25, 258, 267-268, 333, 129
342-343, 391n20. WORKS: The Repudiation Butler, Samuel, 142
(La répudiation), 267; Sunstroke (L'insolation), Byron, Lord, 134, 146
2 67,343 Byzantine empire, 242
Bouhours, Dominique, Father, 65. WORKS:
Conversations between Ariste and Eugene Cahier vaudois (review), 217, 296, 299
(Entretiens d'Ariste et d'Eugène), 65-66 Caillois, Roger, 25, 27, 290
Bourbon, Nicolas, 6 l Calder, Alexander, I26
Bourdaloue, Louis, 69 Calder6n de la Barca, Pedro, 236
Bourdieu, Pierre, 34, 88, I68, 188, 358n3, Calvinism, 50
382n4 0 , 397n2,39 8n29 Camôes, Luis de, 62, 285, 286, 287. WORKS: Os
Bourget, Paul-Charles-]oseph, I02.WORKS: Es- Lus{adas, 286
says in Contemporary Psychology (Essais de Camus, Albert, 99, IF, 143,321,343
psychologie contemporaine), 102 Canada: Anglophone, 117, I22-I23;
Boyd, Ernest, 154-155 Francophone, 85, II7, 157,231-232,283-
Brancusi, Constantin, 29, I26, 181 2 84
Brandes, Edvard, 137 Candi do, Antonio, 16, 100,277-278
Brandes, Georg, 96,97-98,99, 137, 159,162, Cantabrian Mountains (Spain), 339, 340
Index 1 405
Caribbean islands, 234, 297, 299 A Short History ofDecay (Précis de
Carpentier, Alejo, 222-223, 232-234, 325. décomposition), 21 7
W ORKS: The Kingdom of this World (El reino Clarin. See Alas, Leopoldo
de este mundo) , 387n28 Clarke, Austin, 188
Carroll, Lewis, 134 Claudel, Paul, 298
Cartelas (review), 232 CoBrA (Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam)
Casa de las Américas (review), 325 movement, 251-253. WORKS: The Cause liVcls
Casanova, Giovanni Giacomo, 68 Understood (La cause était entendue) (CoBrA
Cassou,]ean, 157 manifesto), 251
Castilian dialect, 19,276,278 CoBrA (review), 252
Catalan language, 256, 274, 276 Cocteau,]ean, I34, 189,223
Catalonia, 104, 195,245-247,264,278, 390n72, Coindreau, Maurice-Edgar, I3 l, 142, I69, 340
393 n 49 Colbert, jean-Baptiste, 69
Catherine II, empress ofRussia, 68 Collège des Lecteurs Royaux, 52
Catholicism, 50, 75,187,190,248,3°7,31 l, Colley, Linda, 37
317,39 8n2 6 Collini, Stefan, 106,240
Cela, Canùlio José, 110 Colombia, 206-207
Celakovsky, Frantisek, 79 Colum, Padraic, 188,226,305,306,311
Celan, Paul, 281. WORKS: Strette, 281 COrlÙntern, 199
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 23, 279, 298 Commonwealth, British, 118, 1I9
Celtic folk:1ore, 187, 188,305 Commonwealth literature, 120, 121,264,275
Cent:ral America, 25, 222, 233, 234,325 Communism, 193,225,252,295, 3I2, 333
Cercle des XX, 132 Compagnon, Antoine, 349
Cervantes, Miguel de, 14,236 Condé, Louis de Bourbon, prince, 69
Césaire, Aimé, 297,300 Confiant, Raphaël, 124, 125, 156,283,296,297,
Cézanne, Paul, 128 298,300,301,40In39
Chamoiseau, Patrick, 125, 156,283,296,297, Congo,259
298, ]00,301, 40In39 Congrès pour la Liberté de la Culture, I44,
Charlemagne, 52 37 6n 43
Charpentier, François, 66. WORKS: Dtjênse of Congreve, William, 208
the French Language for the Inscription on the Connolly, Cyril, 303, 3 I7· WORKS: Enemies <1.
Triumphal Arch (Difense de la langue françoise Promise, 303
pour l'inscription de l'Arc de triomphe), 66 Conrad,joseph, 28 I
Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte de, Conscience, Hendrik, 248
143,222. WORKS: Atala, 222 Constantinople, 242
Chatto and Windus (publishing house), 141 Coover, Robert, 169
Chenetier, Marc, 169 Copenhagen, 98, 251
Chicago,3 1 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 186
Chichén Itza, 241 Cork Realists, 225, 312
Chile, 151 Corneille, Pierre, 67, 69,134
China, 147-148, 151-152 Cortazar,julio, I66, 325-326
Chinese language, 256 éosié, Dobrica, 280
Chopin, Fryderyk (Frédéric), 186 Couchoro, Félix, 260
Christianity, 59 Court Theatre, I60
Church ofEngland, 74 Couto, Mia, I23, I24
Cicero, 49,53,59,70 Cowley, Malcolm, I3 l, 340
Cioran, Enùl Michel, 3, 139, 183-184,213, Cracow, 247
215-21 7,258,259,278,281, 315, 384nI7, Crane, Hart, I34
38 5n24. W ORKS: Breviary of the Vtmquished Crémazie, Octave, I57
(Î'1dreptar patima~), 215; Changit1g the Face of Creoles and Creoleness, 84, I56, 283, 296-302
Romania (Schimbarea la jàtèi a Romattiei), 184; Crnjanski, Milos, 28
406 1 Index
Croats, 78, 182, 187 Dorat Oean Dinemandi), SI
Cuba, 206, 222, 232-234,325 Dos Passos, John, 130, 169,344
Cuchulain (Irish legendary figure), 19°,3°5, Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 199,260
306,381n35 Dotremont, Christian, 251, 252
Cummings, E. E., 134 DowelI, Coleman, 169
Curtius, Ernst, 27. WORKS: French Culture (Die Drachmann, Holger, 98
franzosische Kultur), 27 Dreyfus Mair, IS0, 363n82
Czech language, 201, 274, 281-282 Dryden,John,73
Czech nationalism, 269 Dublin, I09, I28, 140, 146, 160, 188, 191,295,
Czechoslovakia, 196,200,309 319; literary description of, 247; relation to
Czechs, 78, 84, 191 London, 314,316; theater in, 307; Trinity
College, I8 9
Dadaism,279 Dublin School, 303
Dahomey, 260 Dubuffet,Jean,253
Daireaux, Max, 184 Du Camp, Maxime, 27
Daive,Jean, 281 DuftY, Enda, 322
Danish language, 256, 277 Dumas, Alexandre, 32, 159
Dante Alighieri, 14,46,49,52,55,56,57,249, Dun Cow, Book of the, 243
319, p8-330. WORKS: The Banquet (Il Duriaud,Jean,290
Convivio), 55; On Vernacular Eloquence (De Durkheim, Émile, 59
vulgari eloquentia), 46,55,329 Dutch language, 248, 256
Danton, Georges-Jacques, 25
Darantière, Maurice, 363n85 Easter 1916 uprising (Ireland), 19°,312
Dario, Rubén, 91, 95, 96-Sn, 99, 223, 246, 326, Eckermann,Johann Peter, 236
355; on attraction of Paris, 32-33; "mental Eckhoud, Georges, 188
Gallicism" of, 19, 138,258,266. WORKS: Eco, Umberto, IOI, 171
Azul, 96; Prosas profanas, 96 École Normale Supérieure, 189
Defauconpret, A.]. B., 146 Ecuador, 222
Deirdre, Irish legend of, 305, 397n4 Edinburgh, 247
Deleuze, Gilles, 165, 166,203-204 Éditions Bordas, 141
Delibes, Miguel, l ro, 280 Éditions Parti Pris, 284
DeLillo, Don, 169 Egypt, 238, 283, 394n53
Delphi,27 Eliot, T. S., 153
Demolder, Eugène, 188 Elizabethan literature, I06
Demosthenes,70 Ellison, Ralph, 173. WORKS: Invisible Man, 173
Denmark, 99,159,162,168 Éloge de la créo/ité (In Praise cf Creoleness) (mani-
Derrida,Jacques, 165, 166 festo),29 6
Descartes, René, 64, 366n46. WORKS: Discourse Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 222. W ORKS: "The
on Method (Discours de la méthode), 64; General American Scholar," 222
and Analytical Grammar (Grammaire générale et England, II, 36,37,55,71,73,85, I05-I06, 312.
raisonnée), 64 See also British Empire; Great Britain; Lon-
Desfi:mtaine, Pierre-François Guyot, Abbé, 68 don
Desnos, Robert, 232 English language, 32,73-75,139,167,258;
Desportes, Philippe, 60 global dominance of, II9, 39Ill21; in Ire-
Diaghilev, Sergei Pavlovich, 126 land, 307, 310,315; London as literary center,
Dib, Mohammed, 220, 235. WORKS: "Thief of 117; Old and Middle English, 240;
Fire," 220 postcolonialliterature and, 275-276; in
Dickens, Charles, 121, 321 United States, 62
Disque Vert, Le (review), r89 "English Men ofLetters" anthology, I06
Djibouti, 260 Enlightenment, French, 84-85
Dongala, Emmanuel, 259-260 Ernst, Max, 126
Index 1 407
Espagne, Michel, 107 Florence, 10-1 l
Espinosa, German, 206 Fo, Dario, 153
Estrella de Chile, La Gournal), 3 l Forster, E. M., 279
Étiemble, René, 378n69 Foucault, Michel, 3. 165, 166
Europe, 10-II, 38,48; Communist parties in, Fouqué, Friedrich, 333
312; "difference markers" in, I03-104; East- France, II, 19,24.29,37,38,54,87; cultural
ern, 18 1; leading literary powers in, 55; Ref- dominance of, l I9; foreign-born writers as-
ormation in, 50; regional dialects in, 274; similated in, 212-219; Francophone Belgium
Yiddish-speaking Jews in, 229 and, 212-213; Latin in schools, 58-60; Nazi
occupation, 194; publishing industry in,
Fagunwa, Daniel Olorunfemi, 227, 228. 358n13; regionalism in, I07-108; religion in,
WORKS: TIu Ski/lfiJ/ Hunter in the Forest if the 50; rivalry with England, 74-75; translated
Spirits (Ogboju-ode ninu igb6 [runmale), 227 works in, 168; universality and, 72. See also
Farah, Nuruddin, 185,254,259,260-261. Paris
WORKS: "Childhood of My Schizophrenia," France, Anatole, 149-150
260; Maps, 260 Franco, Gen. Francisco, 1l l, 113, 194, 197, 246,
Farquhar, George, 208 37 2n 54
Faulkner, William, 4,85,95,1°3,328,355, François l, king of France, 52
400n24; consecrated in Paris, 125, 142, 169, Francophone area, II7, 122, 124-125,205,
337; Nobel Prize and, 153; revolution 212-213,257,265-266,296-302, 396n89. See
st:awned by, 336-345, 400n24, 40rnn27,39; also French language
road to recognition, 130-13 1; in translation, Franco-Prussian War, 132
I34· WORKS:As [Lay Dying, 130, 131,337, Frank.furt, 164
339; Mosquitoes, 130; The Portable Faulkner Frederick II, king ofPrussia, 9,18,68,70-71,
(anthology), 131,340; Requiem for a Nun, 90-91, 367n59. WORKS: On German Litera-
13 1; Sanctuary, 1°7, 130, 13 1; Sartoris, 130; Sol- ture (De la littérature allemande), 9,18,70
dier's Pay, 130; TIle Sound and the Fury, 130, French language, 18, 19,23,32,281-282,346;
13 1; TIle Wild Palms, 340 battle over, 57-62; in Belgium, 84,248; em-
Favre de Vaugelas, Claude, 62. W ORKS: Remarks pire of, 67-73,238; English challenge to
on the French Language (Remarques sur la dorninance of, 73-75; Latin and, 50, 51, 52-
langue françoise) , 62 55,285; postcolonial writers and, 265-268;
Febvre, Lucien, 350 Québécois, 283-284; standardization of, 63-
Fénéon, Felix, 132 67; translation into, 135; Tuscan and, 52,55.
Feraoun, Mouloud, 227. WORKS: Land and See also Francophone area
Blood (La terre et le sang), 227; The Son if the French Revolution, 24, 25
Poor Mm! (Le fils du paullre), 227 Fresnais,joseph-Pierre, 146
Ferguson, Priscilla Clark, 15 Freud, Sigmund, 280
Ferreira, Vergilio, 134 Fromentin, Eugène, 348
Ferro, Marc, 84 Fuchs, Rudolf, 392n32
Figaro, Le (newspaper), 133 Fuentes, Carlos, 166, 199,241,325. WORKS: TIle
Fiji Islands, 2 IO Buried Mirror (El espejo enterrado), 241; Geog-
Films Barcelona, 246 raphy if the NOllel (Geogrqfla de la nOIle/a), 199;
Finland, 50, 166 Masked Days (Los dîas emnascarados), 199
Finnish language, 78 Fumaroli, Marc, 47, 48,51,54,56,63,349
First World War, 150,200,217
Fitzgerald, Edward, 388n49 Gaddis, William, 169
Flaubert, Gustave, 26, 321. WORKS: Sentimental Gaelic language, 78,190,238,248,256,262,
Education (L'éducation sentimentale), 26 264,315; as "chronically translated" lan-
Flemish language, 214, 248 guage, 259; difficulty ofwriting in, 261;
Flemish literature, 1]2, 179 Dublin School and, 303; literary capital and,
Flemish painting, 188 274-2 75
408 1 Index
Gaelic League (Connradh na Gaeilge), 305, Granville-Barker, Harley, 160
30 7-3IO Grass, Günter, 167
Galiani, Ferdinando, 68 Grasset, Bernard, 157, 301
Galician dialect, 276 Gray, Alasdair, 293
Gallegos, Romulo, 94 Great Bible, 74
Gallocentrism, 46 Great Britain, 167, 169, 170, 195,244. See also
Gandhi, Mohandas, 2 I ° British Empire; England; Seotland
Gangotena, Alfredo, 32, 2I3, 214, 258. WORKS: Greece, 80,191,223,240,241-242
Ecuador, 2I3 Greek language (classical), 48,53,54,59,60,72,
Gao Xingjian, 148, I51, I53. WORKS: Soul 220,235,23 8
Motmtain (Ling Shan), I52 Greek language (modern), 78, 238, 256
Garcia Calderon, Ventura, 32 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 226,305,306,311,315,
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, 85,153, I66, 206, 234, 397n6. WORKS: Ctlchulain C!fMuirthenme,
24 1,246 ,344 397n4
Gass, William H., I69 Grein,Jaeob Thomas, 160, 163
Gaudi, Antoni, 246 Grieg, Edvard, 161
Gauguin, Paul, 132 Griffith, Arthur, 250-251
Gautier, Théophile, 388n49 Griffith, D. W, 31
German language, 18-19,32,49-50,68,84, Grimm, Friedrich Melchior von, 68
177,202,235-23 8,242 Grimm, Ludwig Carl and Wilhelm Carl, 79, 159
Germany, 11,36,37-38,68, I07-I08, 158-159, Gris,Juan,126
168; "backwardness" of, 76, 90-91; campaign Grohmann, Will, 348
against empire of French, 71, 75-76, 77, II9, Gruppe 47, IlO, 167,331
238; East (German Democratie Republie), Gual, Adriano, 246
331; Herderian revolution and, 224; Nazi re- Guatemala, 151, 184
gime, 19, 30,252,33 I, 333; Scandinavian Guattari, Félix, 203-204
eountries and, 97; Weimar, 138 Guyana, 210
Gide, André, 115, I30,223,279
Gilbert, Stuart, 145 Hagiwara, Sakutaro, 33
Gilliard, Edmond, 217 Hain-teny, 266, 392n29
Girnferrer, Pere, 278 Hamilton, Anthony, 68
Girodias, Maurice, 140 Hammer-Purgstall,Josef von, Baron, 388n49
Glaser, Georg K., 25 Hardy, Thomas, 110
Glasgow, 247 Harper's Magazine, 348
Glasgow Sehool, 293-294 Hass, Willy, 392n32
Glissant, Édouard, 116,125,180, 40In39 Hausa language, Islamie literature in, 39In16
Goethe,Johann Wolfgang von, 10, 13-14,40, Havana, 222, 325
76, 127,212; on devouring power oflan- Hawkes,John, 169
guage, 236; on German language, 236-237; Heaney, Seamus, 318,328
hegemony over German letters, 333 Hebrew language, 208, 256
Goldsmith, Oliver, 208 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 77, 99
Goll, Ivan, 14.6 Heine, Heinrich (Henri), 25, 32
Gomberville, Marin Le Roy de, 65. WORKS: Hellens, Franz, I89
Exile if Polexander and Ericlea (Exil de Hemingway, Ernest, 153,293,344
Polexandre et d'Ériclée), 65 Henri II, king of France, 51
Gombrowicz, Witold, 143-144, 186. WORKS: Henry VIII, king ofEngland, 74
Perdydurke, 143, 376n44; The Marriage (Slub), Herder,Johann Gottfried von, 19,44,47,71,
143,144; Trans.Atlantyk, 143-144, 376n44 72,75-77,103,223,294, 399n6; influence of,
Gomez Carrillo, Enrique, 184 77-79; Irish Literary Revival and, 306; on
Gomez de la Serna, Ramon, 129, 142, 157 language and nation, 104; notion of the peo-
Goncourt Prize, 121, 195,301 ple and, 224; popular drama and, 3 12; small
Index 1 409
Herder,Johann Gottfried von (continued) 309. WORKS: Literary History rfIreland, 309;
nations' right to existence and, 255; on TIze Love Songs of Connacht, 309; The Tivisting
translation, 236, 237; Ziorùsts as heir to, 270. rfthe Rope (Casadh an tSugain), 308, 389n69
W ORKS: Another Philosophy rf History jor the
Education rf Mankind (Auch eine Philosophie Ibsen, Henrik, 4, 79, 98, I29, 133, 176,328,354;
die Gesehichte zur Bildung der Menschheit), 76; Joyce's admiration of, 248-250; realism and,
Fragments concerning Recent German Literature 3 II; reception in England and France, I57-
(Uber die neure deutsehe Literatur: Fragmente), 163. WORKs:A Doll's House (Et Dukkehejm),
77; On German Style and Art (Votl deutscher I5g-I60,250; Ghosts (Gengangere), 160, I62;
Art und Kunst), 76; Rif/eetions on the Philoso- Hedda Gabier, 160; TIze Lady from the Sea
phy rf the History of Mankind (Ideen zur (Fruenfra Havet), 162; The League rfYouth
Philosophie der Gesehichte der Menschheit), 78; (De Unges Forbund), 159; The Master Builder
Treatise on the Origin ofLanguages (Bygmester Solness), 160; Peer Gynt, 159, 161,
(Abhandlung aber den Ursprung der Spraehe), 71 249; TIze Wild Duck (Vildanden), 162
Hesse, Hermann, 149 Icaza,]orge,94
Hidayat, Sadig, 239, 327. WORKS: TIze Blind Iman Gournal), 233
Owl (Buf; kur), 239, 388n46 Impressionism, 132, 133
Higgins, F. R., 188 Indépendance Tchèque, L' (journal), 3l
Hindi language, 257 Independent Theatre Society, 16o
Hitler, Adolf, 98 India, II, IIO, 166,211-212,239,263,264;
Ho Chi Minh, II 8 English language and, 117, l 18; Irish litera-
Hobsbawm, Eric, 48, 274 ture and, 323
Hoepffer, Bernard, 169 Indo-European languages, 237-238
Hofinann, Gert, 167 Institut Littéraire de Paris, 144
Hofinann, Michael, 167 Iran, 166,238,239
Holbach, Paul-Henri-Dietrich d', 68 Ireland, 55, 84, 95, I04, 128-129, 155, I83, 225-
Hëlderlin, Friedrich, 77 226,228, 393n49, 397IlI; Abbey Theatre,
Hollywood culture, 170 19I-192; Anglo-Irish "mixed" language in,
Holocaust, 28 l 283,310,317; Belgian literature and, 248;
Holz, Arno, 149 Gaelic language in, 275, 276; "invention" of,
Homer, 236. WORKS: Iliad, 236; Odyssey, 236 305; London's literary centrality and, 118;
Hong Kong, 120, 166 nationalism, 314; Northern, 318
Horace, 61 Irish Citizen Army, 3 I2
Horiguchi, Daigaku, l 34 Irish Literary Revival, I8g-19I, 209, 221, 225,
Hou Hsiao·-Hsien, I67 304-305; assinùlationism and, 313--315; au-
Hova language, 266, 392Il28 tonomists and, 315-32°; Gaelic League and,
Hugo, Victor, I9, 24, 26, 28,32,68,88-89, I30, 3°7-310; invention of tradition and, 305-
I43, 260. WORKS: Les Misérables, 26, 28; 307; literary space, 320-323; realism and,
Ninety-three (Quatre-vingt-treize), 26; Notre- 3 l 1-3 13; written oral language and, 3 10-
Dame de Paris, 26 3II
Huizinga,Johan,I49 Irish Literary Theatre, 192,249,306
Hulme, Keri, 120 Irish National Theatre, 307, 311
Hulme, T. E., 126 Irish Renaissance, 181
Hungarian (Magyar) language, 78, I34, 25I, Iron Guard (Romanian), I83
274 Ishagpour, Youssef, 239
Hungary, 32, 78, 250-251,309 Ishiguro, Kazuo, 120
Hussein, Taha, II 5 Istrati, Panait, 139,281
Husserl, Edmund, 350 Italian language, II, 19,72,220. See also Tuscan
Huysmans,Joris Karl, 102, 3 l 1. WORKS: Against dialect
the Grain (À rebours), 102 Italy, II, 49,54,55-57,62,68,70,91,168,329
Hyde, Douglas, 190, 193, I95, 238,307,308, Ivory Coast, 265
4 IO 1 Index
Jacobsen,]. P., 98 208,247,249,287,313-314,315,316,317,
Jakobson, Roman, 359n20 ]21,322,334-33 6
James, Henry, 1-2, 3,6,83,142. WORKS: "The Jurt,Joseph, 102
Figure in the Carpet;' l, 2
Jameson, Fredric, 321 Kabyle poetry, 226-227
Jarrunes, Francis, 134 Kafka, Franz, 4,34,41,167,176,196,279,303,
Japan, 106-107, 120, 191,387027 352,355; German language and, 84,263,269,
Japanese language, 134 271-273, 392n35; on linguistic impossibili-
Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter), 77 ties, 254; modernity and, 353-354; Parisian
Jeismann, Michael, 36 critics and, 155-156; political connection,
Jelenski, Constantin, 144, 376n44 200-204; on politics and literature, 175; in
Jelinek, Elfriede, 166 translation, 107,239,327; Yiddish language
Jeremié, Dragan, 110, 280 and, 201-202, 229-230, 269-273. WORKS:
Jerome, Saint, 142, 375n40 Amerika, 271; Diaries, 175,273; The Forgotten
Jeune Belgique (review), 188 One (Der Verschollene), 271; "The Great Wall
Jews, 84, 200, 208, 229, 263, 269-273, 392n3 1. of China" ("Beim Bau der chinesischen
See also Yiddish language Mauer"), 271,3°3; "Investigations of a Dog"
Jiménez,Juan Ramén, 97 ("Forschungen eines Hundes"), 271; Meta-
Johns Hopkins University, The, 166 morphosis, 107
Johnson, Uwe, 167, 168, 331. WORKS: Anniver- Kandinsky, Vassily, 126,252
saries (Jahrestage), 168 Karadzié, Vuk, 79
Jolas, Eugène, 146 Karpinski, Francisek, 144
Jones, Sir William, 212 Kaun, Axel, 319
Jordaens, Jacob, 188 Kaurismaki, Aki, 167
Jorn, Asger, 251, 252 Kawabata, Yasunari, 15 l, 377n64
Joyce,James, 41, 46,55,101,176,189,279,354, Keene, Donald, 377n64
355, 398n29; assimilation and, 208-209; as Kells, Book of, 243
auto no mous writer, 315-318; consecration Kelman,James, 293, 294, 298. WORKS: TI/e
in Paris, 145; Dante and, 329; Dublin and, Busconductor Hines, 294
247; Dublin School and, 303; as émigré, 176; Kenya, 195,229,231,275,276,309, 386l1I8,
English language viewed by, 265, 271; exile 393 n 40
in Paris, 95,126, 128-129,206,304,317, Khayyam, Omar, 239, 327. WORKS: Rubaiyat,
398n26; on Gaelic League, 308; Ibsen and, 239,3 88n49
248-250; on Irish Literary Theatre, 192; on Khlebnikov, Velimir, 10, 19, 359n25
Irish literary tradition, 243; on Irish use of Kiberd, Declan, 308, 323
English language, 324; Larbaud and, 154- Kierkegaard, S0ren, 99
155; legacy and influence of, 330-336, Kieslowski, Krysztof, 167
399n7; literary language and, 345; modernity Kikuyu language, 231, 259, 275, 276, 393n40
and, 22-23; on nationalism, 196-197; reac- Kiltartan dialect, 306, 397n6
tions to, 109; as revolutionary, 4, 328; "stream Kim Yun-Sik, 386l1IO
of consciousness" technique, 261; in transla- KingJames Bible ("Authorized Version"), 74
tion, 103, 134. WORKS: "Anna Livia Plura- Kipling, Rudyard, 153
belle," 146; "The Day of the Rabblement," Kis, Danilo, 4, 27-28,37,41,101, 110,166,326,
192,249; "Drama and Life;' 249; Dubliners, 355, 399n4; on consecration in Paris, 129; as
128,247,316; Finnegans VVtlke, 46,55,103, Croat writer, 182; as émigré, 176,206;
142,146,316,329,330,332,345; "Ibsen's French language and, 135; on literary pro-
New Drama," 250; "Ireland, Island of Saints vincialism, 94-95; literary provincialism and,
and Sages," 308; Our Exagmination round !lis 113-115; on modernity, 91-92; on political
Factification for lncamination of Work in Progress, literature, 198; in translation, 280; as transla-
329; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, tor, 134. WORKS: TI/e Anatomy Lesson (éas
110,128; Ulysses, 103, 128, 129, 140, 145, 155, anatomij"e), II3-II4, 280; A Tomb for Boris
Index 1 4II
Kis, Danilo ((ontinued) 222,234; modernity and, 92-93, 96-97; poli-
Davidovich (Grobr/ica za Borisa Davidoviè'a), tics in, 206; relation ta world literary center,
II4 184-185; two branches of; 180; Western cul-
Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 19, 119 ture and, 85
Koch-Grünberg, Theodor, 288, 29I. WORKS: Latin language, 1 1, 19, 46, 47, 48-57; battle over
From Roraima ta the Oritzoco (Vom Roraima French and, 57-60; Bible and, 375n40; dom-
zum Orinoco) , 288 inance of, 220-221, 235; in England, 74;
Koestler, Arthur, 30-31 French challenge to, 285, 289; French vic-
Kondrotas, Saulius, 181-182 tory over, 6j, 72; German compared with,
Koran, 260, 343 238; Herder effect and, 79; Italian and, 55;
Korea, 147, 166, 191, 199, 383n53 national (vulgar) languages and, 324; Portu-
Korean language, 256 guese and, 287
Kosztolanyi, Dezso, 134 Latvian language, 78
Kourouma, Ahmadou, 265. WORKS: Suns of Lautréamont, Comte de, 134
Itldepmderlce (Les soleils des indépendarlces) , 265 Le Grand, Sieur des Herminières, Monsieur,
KrleZa, Miroslav, 182, 187 59-60
Kultura (journal), 143 Lehmbruck, Wilhelm, 126
Kundera, Milan, 166, 182-183, 191,258,281- Le Laboureur, Louis, 60, 65. WORKS: Advantages
282 of the French Language over the Latin Language
Kunene, Mazisi, 239, 268. WORKS: The Ancestors (Des avantages de la langue française sur la
and the Sacred Mountains, 268; Emperor Shaka langue latine), 60, 65
thè Great, 268; Zulu Poems, 268 Lemonnier, Camille, 188
Kupka, Frantisek, 126 Lenz,Jakob Michael Reinhold, 19
Léon, Paul, 146
Laâbi, Abdellâtif, 257 Leonard, Tom, 293, 294
La Bruyère,Jean de, 66, 67 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 19, 1 I9, 348
Lacan,Jacques, 15 Le Tourneur, Pierre, 146
Lacretelle,Jacques de, 223 Letters, Republic of,2I
La Fontaine,Jean de, 66, 67 Lettres françaises, Les (Communist journal), 252
Laforgue,Jules, 143,266 Levinson, André, I 39
Lamartine, Alphonse de, 32 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 29I
Landsmdl (country language), 158,274 Lewis, Sinclair, I 51
Lapland,25 2 Lewis, Wyndham, I26
Larbaud, Valery, 5-6,10,17,21-22,29-30,39, Linnaeus, Carolus, 287
87,145,170, 395n76; américaniste tradition Lipchitz,Jacques, 126
and, 169; Brazilian modernism and, 290; on Lisbon, 122
consecration in Paris, 128-129; on elites, 110; Lithuanian language, 78,181-182
Faulkner and, 337, 339; on "intellectual In- Little Review, 145
ternational," 172; as translator, 103, 142-143. Lodge, Anthony, 64
WORKS: Paris de France, 29; Readirlg, This Un- Lodge, David, 17I
pUrlished Vice: English Domain (Ce vice impuni, Lohengrin (Wagner opera), 132, 161
la lecture: Domaine anglais), 10, IlO, 37sn40; Loiseau, Georges, 137
Under the Protection of Saint Jerome (Sous London, II, 24, 93, 95, I09, 117, 164,243,
l'invocation de sairltJérôme), 5, 375n40 373nI3; consecration in, 263; Irish writers
Larionov, Mikhail Fyodorovich, 126 and, 190; Irish writers in, 208, 3I3-3I5; as
La Rochefoucauld, François, duc de, 70, 217 literary center, II7-II9; rivalry with New
Larson, Charles R., 156 York, II9, 122, 123; rivalry with Paris, I53,
Latin America, II, 16, 31-32,38,44,79; anach-- 165; theater in, I60. See also British Empire;
ronism in, 100; Barcelona and, 246; Faulk- Commonwealth literature; England
ner's influence in, 344--345, 40In39; literary London,Jack, 335. WORKS: TIle Sea Wolf, 335
"boom" in, 325-326; "magical realism" in, Longeuil, Christophe de, 52
4 I2 1 Index
Lope de Vega, 8S Martyn, Edward, 226,305,306, 3II, 315
Lortholary, Bernard, 383n56 Marx, Karl, 118,280
Louis XlV, king of France, 54,60,63,65,67, Marxism, 276
69-70,72,216,281 Massenet,jules, 132. WORKS: Hérodiade, 132
Louis Xv, king of France, 68 Matillon,Janine, 183
Lowy, Isak, 201, 202, 203, 229, 273 Matos, Antun Gustav, 28
Lugné-Poë, Aurélien, 133, 137, 162-163 Maupassant, Guy de, 32, 137
Lully,jean-Baptiste,69 Mauriac, François, 98
Luther, Martin, 49, 364n II Mauritius, 210
Lutheranism, 50, 99 Maurois, André, 99
Lyotard,jean-François, 165, 166 Maurus, Patrick, 199
Megalè Jdea (Great Idea), 241
MacDonagh, Thomas, 190 Memmi, Albert, 258-259
MacGreevy, Thomas, 348 Mendès, Catulle, 19
Machado, Gerardo, 232 Mendes, Muril, 234
Machado de Assis,joaquim Maria, 32,97,277, Mendoza, Eduardo, 247, 264, 278
39S n 7 6 Mera,Juan Leon, 222
Machu Picchu, 241 Mercure de France (review), 138
Mac Néill, Eoin, 307 Methodism, 50
Madagascar, 265-267, 392n28 Mexico, 93, 166,223,240-241
Madrid, II, 246, 247, 338, 341 Michaux, Henri, 4, 29,32,41, 1I0, 152, 176,
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 132, 133, 16~h 163,248 216,3 IS, 385nn21,24; assimilation and, 206,
Magritte, René, 251 207,212-215; on Belgian literature, 188--189.
Mahfouz, Naguib, 1S 1 WORKS: A Barbarian in Asia (UII barbare el!
Maison des Amis des Livres, 145 Asie), 213; A Certaill Plume (UII certain
Major, André, 284. WORKS: The Cabochon (Le plume), 213, 214; Elsewhere (Ailleurs), 213; "A
Cabochon), 284 Few Particulars Concerning Fifty-nine
Makerere University College (Uganda), 231 Years of Existence" ("Quelques
Malagasy French, 258 renseignements sur cinquante-neuf années
Malagasy language, 266-267 d'existence"), 214, 215; "Lettre de
Malherbe, François de, 47, 60-61, 64, 287 Belgique," 188-189; Trave/s ill Great
Malinke language, 265 Garabagne (\/Oyage en Grand Garabagne), 213,
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 57,132-133,143, 3II. 38 5nI8
WORKS: "Remembrance ofBelgian Michelet,Jules,3 2
Friends" ("La remémoration d'amis belges"), Mickiewicz, Adam, 186
132-133 Mirbeau, Octave, 133,163
Malraux, André, 131 Miro, Gabriel, 129
Mammeri, Mouloud, 226, 264. WORKS: TIle Mishima, Yukio, 115
Forgotten Hill (La colline oubliée), 226; see a/so Mistral, Frédéric, 33
386nI 1 Mistral, Gabriela (Lucila Godoy Alcayaga), 33,
Man, Paul de, 128 ISI
Mandelstam,Ossip, 134 Mitchell, Margaret. W ORKS: Gone with the
Mann, Thomas, 107, 167,279 Wind,170
Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitsky), 126 Mo, Timothy, 120
Marat,jean-Paul,25 Modigliani, Amadeo, 126
Marias,javier, II3 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 67, 69
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 32. WORKS: "Fu- Moller, Peter, 99, 396n95
turist Manifesto," 32 Molnar, Katalin, 324, 345-346. WORKS: On
Marsé,juan, 278 Language, 324
Martin, Roland, 376n48 Moncada,jesus, 278
Martinique, 104,296,297,300, 393n49 Mondrian, Piet, 126,252
Index 1 41 3
Monénembo, Tierno, 125 Negritude, 297, 300
Monnier, Adrienne, 29,145 Neocolonial novel, 379n14
Montale, Eugenio, 153 Neo-Gothic (architectural style), 368n73
Montreal, 232, 283 Neoimpressionism, 132
Monza, Quim, 247, 278 Neruda, Pablo, 153,234,322
Moore, George, 154,226,303,305,306,311, Neustadt Prize, 376n52
315. WORKS: Diarml/id and Grtlitme (with New Criticism, 321
Yeats), 389n69 New Directions (publishing house), 140
Moore, Thomas, 146 New York City, 92, 93,109, II7, 164,206; as
Morand, Paul, 134 city ofjewish immigration, 270,334; lrish-
More, Sir Thomas, 363n77 Americans in, 318; rivalry with London, 119,
Morel, Auguste, 145 122,123; rivalry with Paris, 165. See also
Morley,john, 106 United States
Moro, César, 32 New York Society for the Suppression of Vice,
Morocco,257 145
Morvan, Françoise, 310 New Zealand, 117,120
Moscow,95 Ngugi wa Thiong'o, 195,229,23 1,258,275-"
Moser,justus, 76, 77 276. WORKS: The Black Hermit, 23 1; Devi! on
Mozambique, 123-124 the Cross (Caitaani mutharaba-ini), 23 1,275; A
Mukhetjee, Bharati, 120 Grain of Wlteat, 231; l Will Marry Wlten l
Munich, 177 Wimt (Ngaahika ndeenda), 231; Petais of Blood,
Murray, T. c., 312 231; The River Between, 231; VJtéep Not, Chi/d,
Mutis, Âlvaro, 206 23 1
Nicaragua, 325
Nabokov, Vladimir, 129, 134, 138, 164,281. Nicolas,jean-Baptiste, 388n49
WORKS: Camera Obscl/ra/LAl/ghter in the Dark Nietzsche, Friedrich, 129, 191
(Kamera Obskl/ra), 139, 375n33; Despair Nieuwenhuys, Constant, 251
(Otchaianie), 139; King, QI/een, Knave (Korol, Nigeria, IIO, 120, 195,227-228
dama, valet), 138; Lolita, 129, 140, 169; The Nineveh,27
LI/zhin Defense (Zashchita LI/zhina), 138-139, Nkashama, Pius Ngandu, 135-136, 386m8
375n30; "Mademoiselle 0," 140; Mary Nobel, Alfred, 147, 149
(Mashen'ka), 138; Nikolai Gogol, 164; Nobel Prize, 168,212, 376n51, 384IlI5; Mrican
"Pouchkine ou le vrai et le vraisemblable," writers, 120,227; East Asian (Chinese, Ko-
140; The Real Lift of Sebastian Knight, 140 rean) writers, 147-148,280; Hispano-Amer-
Nabuco,joaquim, 32. WORKS: The Choice ican writers, 92, 94,180,206,233,234,241,
(L'Option),3 2 325; Irish writers, 187,3°7,313,318; North
Nadeau, Maurice, 144, 169, 376n44 American writers, 131; Portuguese-speaking
Nagai, Kafu, 32 writers, 148; South Asian (Indian) writers,
Naipaul, V. S., 4, 110, 120, 178,205,209-212, 135,149
215,217,315. WORKs:An Area ofDarkness, Noh theater, 311
384IlI2; The Enigma of Arrivai, 210; India: A Noiret,joseph, 251, 252
Million Mutinies Now, 384n12; India: A Norman Conquest,73
WOImded Civilization, 384n12; "Our Univer- North America, I I
sal Civilization," 205 Norway, 5°,79,98, 129,158,162,248,250,309
Nairobi, University of (Kenya), 23 1 Norwegian language, 78, 256, 274
Naples, 24 NOl/velle Revue Française Uournal), 13 l, 146, 157
Narayan, R. K., Il8, 264 Nouvelles Littéraires, Les Uournal), 138-139
Nation Tchèque, LA Oournal), 31 Novalis, Friedrich, 77, 236
Na Zdar Oournal), 31 Nyerere,Julius, 387n34. TRANS LATIONs:]ulius
Nazism, 19,30,252,331,333 Caesar, 387n34; The Merchant of Venice,
Ndebele, Njabulo, 261'-262 387n34
414 1 Index
Nyl10rsk (new Norwegian), 158,256,274 ater in, 160; as universal capital, 108. See also
Nyugat Uournal), 36In50 France
Paris Gllide (1867),24,88
O'Casey, Sean, 192, 193,225,305,311-313, Parnassism, 223, 265
398n14. WORKS: Cathleen Ustens In, 312; Parnell, Charles Stewart, 190,249,308
JU110 and the Paycock, 3 I2; The PlolIgh and the Parti Pris (review), 284
Stars, 312; The Shadow ,!fa Grmman, 192, Pascal, Blaise, 67
312 Paulhan, Jean, 266
O'Conaire, Padraic, 307,308 Pavel, Thomas, 59
O'Connell, Daniel, 308 Pavié, Milorad, 101
Oe, Kenzaburo, 377n63 Paz, Octavio, 28, 43, 82, 85,92-94, I25, 244;
Oehlenschlager, Adam, 277 Mexican national identity and, 241; mod-
O'Grady, StandishJames, 190, 196, 305. ernization and, 326-327; Nobel Prize and,
WORKS: History cf lreland: Heroic Period, 305 234,241; on tension in American literatures,
Okri, Ben, 120,228. WORKS: The Famished 18o. WORKS: In Light of lndia (Vislumbres de
Road,228 la lndia), 28; "In Search of the Present" ("La
Old English, 240 busqueda del presente") (Nobel Prize ac-
Old World, 243 ceptance speech), 92-93; The Labyril1th cf
Oliveira, Alberto de, 45, 286 Solitude, 82, 92, 241
Oliveira, Manuel de, 167 Pearse, Patrick, 190,3°7,309
Olympia Press, 140 Pellisson, Paul, 59
Ondaatje, Michael, 120, 122 Pérez Gald6s, Benito, 149
O'Neill, Eugene, 151 Pérez-Reverte, Arturo, 101
Onetti,Juan Carlos, 325 Péron, Alfred, 141, 146, 376n50
Opéra Français, 132 Perrault, Charles, 66-67. WORKS: The Century
Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts, 51 of Louis the Great (Le siècle de Louis le Grand),
Ors, Eugenio d', 246 66; Parallels between the Ancients and the Mod-
Orthodox Christianity, 198 ems (Parallèles des anciens et des modernes), 66
Ossian, 76,306 Persian language, 239, 256, 327
Oster, Daniel, 26 Peru,32
Ottawa, 283 Peter the Great, 198
Oxford Englislz Dictionary, 106 Pétillon, Pierre-Yves, 169
Petites Écoles des Messieurs de Port·-Royal, 59
Pakistan, 121 Pet6fi, Sandor, 134
Pak Kyong-Ni, 147,280. WORKS: Land (T'oji), Petrarch, Francesco, 49,56,236
147 Picasso, Pablo, I26, 233
Palestine, 270 Pichot, Amédée, 146
Pamies, Sergi, 278 Pietri, Arturo Uslar, 85, 222, 232
Paparrigopoulos, Konstantinos, 242. W ORKS: Pinero, Arthur Wing, 378n82
History of tlze Greek Nation (Historia tOIl Pirandello, Luigi, 110
hellenikou ethnous), 242 Plato,7°
Pardo Bazan, Emilia, 102. WORKS: The Burning Pléiade, 47,51,54,55,220,255; France as liter-
Qllestion (La cuestion palpitante), 102 ary power and, II; status of French language
Paris, II, 23-24, 25-34,87,93,109; artistic cen- and, 57, 58,60,61
trality challenged, 251-253; consecration in, Poe, Edgar Allen, 97,134
127-131,230; "decline" of, 164-165; émigrés Poles and Poland, 78, 80,144,166,186,229,
in, 138-140, 143, 206,232,317, 375n29; mo- 27°
dernity and, 96,126,334; postcolonial writ- Polish language, 143,274
ers and, 122, 124-I25; prestige of, 96; rivalry Pomès, Mathilde, 395n76
with Brussels, 13 1- 133; rivalry with London, Ponge, Francis, 152
153,165; rivalry with New York, 165; the- Pope, Alexander, 73
Index 1 4I 5
Port of Spain (Trinidad), 210 Notes ,!fa MU/dois (Paris: Notes d'un vaudois),
Port-Royal, 59, 64 218; Raison d'être, 2IO, 217-218, 296
Portugal, 85, 124, 166, 168, 193, 194,285,288, Ray, Satyajit, 167
33 8 Réau, Louis, 73
Portuguese language, 62,123-124,148,258, Reformation, 49
277-278,286-287 Reissig, Herrera, 223
Posledllie Novosi (newspaper), 139 Renaissance, II,35,59,61, I04
Pound, Ezra, 16-17, I26. WORKS: ABC rifRead- Renaissance vaudoise, 2 l 7
ing, 16; Cantos, 16 Renan, Ernest, 388n49
Prado, Paulo, 32 Renaud,Jacques, 284. WORKS: Broke City (Le
Prague, 200, 202, 204, 229, 269, 272 Cassé), 284
Prague Circle, 269, 271, 272 Republica Cubana, La Uournal), 31
Pre-Raphaelites, 133, 388n49 Revel, Jacques, 362n76
Preuves (review), 144, 376n44 Reyes, Alfonso, 32 5
Prévert, Jacques, 134 Ricard, Alain, 276
Prévost, Antoine-François, abbé, 146 Richardson, Samuel, 146
Protestantism, 50,74,75,190,307,309,310, Richter,Jean Paul, 77
312,3 17 Ridder, André de, 179
Proust, Marcel, 28, I07, IlO, I89, 279,35 1,355. Riffaterre, Michael, I97
WORKS: In Search '!fLost Time (A la recherche Rights of Man, Declaration of the, 24
dû temps perdu), 107,351-352,355 Riksmal (state language), I58
Provençalliterature, 108 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 167,266,273
Prussia, 9, 18 Rimbaud, Arthur, 91, 266
Puértolas, Soledad, 113 Rio de Janeiro, 247, 288, 291
Putnam, Samuel, 189 Rivarol, Antoine de, 47, 67, 71-72. WORKS:
Discourse on the Universality '!J. the French Lan-
Quatre Gats, Els, 246 guage (Discours de l'universalité de la langue
Quebec, I04, 157, 195,231-232,283, 390n72. française), 71-72, 359n22
See also Canada, Francophone Rivas, Pierre, 292
Queir6s, Eça de, 277 Rivera, Diego, 233
Queneau, Raymond, 134,290 Rivera, Eustasio, 94
Quevedo y Villegas, Francisco G6mez de, 85 Robert, Marthe, 155, 38 3n56
Quinet, Edgar, 78 Robespierre, Maximilien, 25
Quintilian, 49 Robinson, Lennox, 312
Roche, Denis, 169
Rabearivelo,Jean-Joseph, 258, 265-267. Roman Empire, 66, 72
WORKS: Almost Dreams (Presque-songes), 266; Romania, 80,183-184,215-217
The Gld Sangs of the Lands of Imerina (Les Romanian language, 78, 278, 281
vieilles chansons des pays d'Imerina), 266; Trans- Romanticism, 222-223, 225
latedfrom the Night (Traduit de la nuit), 266 Romantics, German, 76,134,235-236,
Racan, Honorat de Bueil, seigneur de, 61 36 5n2 0
Racine,Jean, 18,69,216 Rome, II, 24, 27, 48,52,164,245
Radnoti, Miklos, 134 Ronsard, Pierre de, 60, 363n77
Rambouillet, Hôtel de, 64-65 Rosa,Joao Guimaraes, 85, 124, 148. WORKS:
Ramos, Graciliano, 124 The Devi! ta Pay in the Backlands (Grande
Ramuz, Charles Ferdinand, 23, 24, IOO, 124, sertào: Veredas), 395n71
156-157,176,177,183,195; arrival in Paris, Rosenberg, Harold, 31, I26. WORKS: The Tradi-
210; assimilation and, 217-219; Creoleness tion of the New, 126
and, 296-301; on cultural "capital," 223; di- Roth, Henry, 328, 331, 334-336. WORKS: Call
lemma of, 180-181,218-219; return to It Sleep, 336; From Bandage, 334; Mercy of a
Switzerland, 244-245, 282. WORKS: Paris: Rude Stream, 334
416 1 lIzdex
Roth, Philip, 156, 169 331-334,345, 374I1l8, 399n7· WORKS:
Raul (newspaper), 138 Brand~ Heath (Brand's Haide), 333; Evetling
Routledge (publishing house), 141 Edged in Gold (Abend mit Goldrand), 333, 345;
Roux, Dominique de, 376n44 Roses and Leeks (Rosen und Porree), 332
Royal Society ofLiterature, 150 Schwartz, Delmore, 140
Rubens, Peter Paul, 132 Schwob, Marcel, 143
Rudmose-Brown, Thomas, 189 Scotland, 247, 28 3, 293--294
Rulfo,Juan,p5 Scott, Walter, 146. WORKS: fMlverley, 146
Rushdie, Salman, 1 IO, 116, I20-I21, 178,210, Scribe, Eugène, 159
212,263; Commonwealth literature and, "Second rhetoric," the, 364I1l5
275-276, 39In21; on English language, 264, Second World War, 79, 1I2, 138, 143
265; exile in London, 206; on translation, Seifert, Jaroslav, 153
136. WORKS: Midnight's Chi/dren, I20; The Seimists, 270
Satanie Verses, 118 Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 267. W ORKS: Anthol-
Russell, Bertrand, 325 ogy of New Black and Malagasy Poetry in
Russell, George (JE), 188,190,226,305. French (Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre
WORKS: Deirdre, 397n4 malgache de la langue française), 267
Russia, 57,78,91,138,166,270 Serbo-Croatian language, 134,135
Russian language, 19 Serbs and Serbia, 78, 114, 198,280
Russian Revolution, 312 Serreau, Geneviève, 376n44
Ruusbroec,Jan van, 112 Seth, Vikram, 121, 171. WORKS: A Suitable Boy,
121-122,171
Said, Edward, 121'-122. WORKS: Culture and Im- Severini, Gino, I26
perialism, 121,322; Orientalism, ]21 Shakespeare, William, 14, 18,76,119,134,143,
Saint-Amant, Marc-Antoine de Gérard, 67 263; centrality of, 161; Ibsen compared with,
Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 143 249; in translation, 146,236, 387n34. WORKS:
Saint-Évremont, Charles de, 65. WORKS: The The Tempest,263
Equestrian Masters (Les Académistes), 65 Shakespeare and Company (bookstore and
St. Petersburg (Russia), 138, 198 publisher), 145
Salazar, Antonio de Oliveira, 194 Shaküntalëi (Sanskrit play), 212
Salinas, Pedro, 107, 37In46 Shanghai, 247
Salonika, 247 Shaw, George Bernard, 1I8, 153, 176,249,316;
Salutati, Coluccio, 49 as assirnilated writer, 26, 207, 208, 304, 313-
Sào Paulo, 122, 123,247,286,287,29°,295 315; Ibsen and, 158, 160-161. WORKs:John
Sapiro, Gisèle, 194 Bull's Other Island, 160, 313; The Perfect fMlg-
Saramago,José, 148, 377n57 nerite, 378n8 1; The Quintessence if Ibsenism,
Sarasin,]ean-François,67 160,249
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 91,94,99,129-130,134,153, Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 32
169,267,33 l, 373n7. WORKS: Roads ta Free- Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 208
dom, 130 Shin Kyong-Nim, 199
Sauerlandt, Max, 348 Sillanpaa, R. E., 149
Savinio, Alberto, 27 Simon, Claude, 153, 342, 400n24
Savremenik (review), 198 Sinn Fein movement, 250
Scandinavia, 97-98, 147,161,252 Sirmond,Jean,61
Schiffiin, André, 170 Skeat, W W, 249. WORKS: Questionsfor Exami-
Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von, 38 nation in English Literature, 240
Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, 237 Slavs,78
Schlegel, Friedrich von, 77 Slovak language, 78
Schlegel, Wilhelm von, 77 Slovene language, 78
Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst, 77 Slovenia, 79
Schmidt, Arno, 4,101, lIO, 134, 166,206,280, Snyder, Richard, 379I1l2
Index 1 4I 7
Society ofEthnography and Folklore (Rio de Surrealism, 32, 251-252 , 279, 327
Janeiro), 291 Swaan, Abram de, 20
Soderberg, Hjalmar, 98. WORKS: Aberrations Swahili language, 231, 276, 387n34, 39IIl16,
(Forville/ser), 370n35; Gertrud, 370n35; The 393 n 4°
Serious Game (Den allvarsamma leken), Sweden, 50,98,162,168
370n35; The Youth ClfMartin Bircks (Martin Swedish Academy, 147, 150, 153,168,234,
Bireks rmgdom), 370n35 377nn 57-58
Somalia, 185,254,259,260 Swedish language, 276
Sorbonne, La, 239, 298 Swift,Jonathan, 73,213. WORKS: Gulliver's
Soupault, Philippe, 146, 376n50 'Travels, 213
South Africa, 120,210,239,261-262,268-269 Switzerland, 30-31,84,115,117,177,217,244-
South America, 25, 222, 233, 234, 325,338 245
Southampton (England), 210 Symbolism, 132-133, 157, 158, 162, 163,223,
Soviet Union, 197, 198,295 248,279; Abbey Theatre and, 311; Mrican
Sovremennyia Zapiski (review), 138, 139, 375n32 writers and, 265; Yeats and, 316
Soyinka, Wole, 110, 1I8, 120, 151,227-228,258 Synge,John Millington, 154, 190, 191, 192,226,
Spain, 1, 19,55,1°7, 168; American literatures 283,295,3°5,3°6; Dublin School and, 303;
and, 85; dominance of Castilian in, 276; written oral language of Ireland and, 310-
Faulkner's influence in, 338-342; military 31 I. W ORKS: Deirdre, 397n4; Play boy cf the
dictatorship in, 193, 194, 197, 372n54; mod- rtéstern fMJrld, 192, 311
ernism in, 102,246
Spanish language, 19,25,96-97,184 Tabucchi, Antonio, 166
Speroni, Sperone, 52 Tagore, Rabindranath, Il5, 1I8, 135, 150, 151,
Spinoza, Baruch, 7. W ORKS: Tractatus Theologico- 153,266. WORKS: Gitanjali, 150
Polilieus, 7 Taine, Hippolyte, 97,143
Spitteler, Carl, 149 Tamashek language, 230
Sri Lanka, 121, 122 Taulipang Indians, 291
Stalinism,204 Temps Modernes, Les Uournal), 91, III, Il2, 141
Stangerup, Hakon, 98 Terence, 59
Stangerup, Henrik, 98-99, 277, 396n95. Terrail, Ponson de, 25
W ORKS: The Raad to Lagoa Santa (Vejen til Texier, Edmond, 27. WORKS: Picture cf Paris
Lagoa Santa), 99; The Sedt/cer (Det er svaert at ('Tableau de Paris), 27
do i Dieppe), 99, 396n95 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 321
Stankovié, Bora, 28 Théâtre de l'Oeuvre, 162, 163
Stein, Gertrude, 3 1,42,88,89,126,242,243. Théâtre-Libre, 137, 160, 161, 162, 3741124
W ORKS: The Autobiography cf Alice B. Toklas, Thebes,27
242; The Making cf Americans, 42; Paris, France, Thiérot,Jacques, 290
88 Tieck, Ludwig, 333
Steiner, George, 376n5I Tilly, Charles, 36
Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), 128, 191 Tito,Josip Broz, 198
Stephens,James, 188,226,305, 397n4 Titus, Edward, 189
Sterne, Laurence, 146 Togo, 26o
Strindberg, August, 98,136,137-138,139,145, Topffer, Rodolphe, 126
258,259,281, 374n24. WORKS: The Confes- Torga, Miguel, 148
sion cf a Fool (Le plaidoyer d'/mfou), 137-138; Toronto, Il7, 122
Creditors (Fordringsagare), 137; The Father Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 1]2
(Fadren), 137; Injèrno, 138; Miss Julie (Froken Transatlantie Review, 188
Julie), 137 Tremblay, Michel, 2]2, 283. WORKS: Les belles-
Sue, Eugène, 25, 26, 32. WORKS: Les mystères de soeurs, 232
Paris, 26 Trier, 24
Supremacy, Act of (1534),74 Trieste, 206, 243, 308, 316
4 I8 1 Index
Trinidad, 205, 209, 210, 2II, 212 Verhaeren, Émile, 188,248
Trinity College (Dublin), 146, 189 Verlaine, Paul, 134, 223, 266
Tsvetayeva, Marina, 134 Vico, Giambattista, 330, 399n6
Tupi Indians, 292 Victoria, queen of United Kingdom, 240
Turenne, Henri de La Tour d'Auvergne, Victorian literature, 106
vicomte de, 69 Vieira,]osé Luandino, 123
Tuscan dialect, 10-II, 49, 52, 55. See also Italian Vietnam War, 325
language Vigny, Alfred de, 143
Tutea, Petre, 278 Vingtistes, 132
Tutuola, Amos, 227-228. WORKS: 'TIle Palm- Virgil, 53, 61, 287
Wine Drinkard, 227, 386m5 Voiture, Vincent, 65
Twain, Mark, 62, 293. WORKS: Huckleberry Finn, Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 67, 69-70,
293 76 ,130,143,3 67n 59
Tzara, Tristan, 29 Voss,]ohann Heinrich, 236
Vraz, Stanko, 79
Uganda, 231, 386m3
Ujevié, Tin, 28 Waberi, Abdourahman, 260
Ukrainian language, 78, 274 Wagenbach, Klaus, 203
Unamuno y Jugo, Miguel, 222 Wagner, Richard, IP, 160-161
Ungar, Hermann, 392n32 Walloons, 213, 214
United States, II,3 1,42,62,78,85, 121, 165, Walser, Robert, 177
166; birth of American novel, 293; Canadian Warburg, Walther von, 63
literature and, 122-123; émigré writers in, War OfI8I2, 122-123, 372n72
140; English as world language and, 39IIl21; Warren, Robert Penn, 134
Irish community in, 123; literary tutelage of Warsaw, 143,202,247
London, 243-244; Nobel Prize winners Wegener, Alfred Lothar, 349
fi·om, 151; publishing industry in, 168-171, Weiss, Ernst, 392np
358n13; Yiddish-speaking]ews in, 229,334. Weiss, Peter, 167
See also New York City Weltsch, Felix, 392n32
Updike,]ohn,15 6 West Indies, 32,125,176,180,209,283,296,
Urquhart,]ane, 122-123. WORKS: 'TIze Mirl- 33 8
pool, 122-I23 Wezel,]ohann Carl, 333
Uruguay, 213 Whitman, Walt, 33,128,243,266,293. WORKS:
Leaves of Grass, 33,244,293; "Mississippi Val-
Valéry, Paul, 9,10, I2-I5, 16-17,22,24,27,266; ley Literature," 244; Specimen Days, 244
Nobel Prize and, 150; on taste, 92; on trans- Wideman,]ohn Edgar, 169
lators, 135; on value, 127. WORKS: "Spiritual Wieland, Christoph Martin, 19,333
Freedom" ("La Liberté de l'esprit"), 9,13 Wilde, Oscar, 134, 163,208. WORKS: Lady
Vallejo, César, p Windermere~ Fan, 208
Vallès,]ules, 26. WORKS: 'TIze Insurrectionist Williams, William Carlos, 32
(L'Insurgé), 26 Winter, Ludwig, 392np
Van Gogh, Vincent, 132 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 82. W ORKS: Philosophical
Van Velde, Abraham, 127-I28, 346, 348 Investigations, 82
Van Velde, Gerardus, 127-128,348 Wolf, Christa, 167-168
Vargas Llosa, Mario, 94,100,130,166,333, Wordsworth, William, I23
344
Vasari, Giorgio, 348 Yacine, Kateb, 41,176,229,230-231,260,272,
Vaud (Swiss canton), 157,244,282,296 343-344,354, 39IIl20. WORKS: Mohamed
Vazquez Montalban, Manuel, 246, 247, 264, prend ta valise, 231; Nedjma, 230
27 8 Yale University, 165
Venice, 10,24 Yeats, William Butler, 41, 1I8, 153, 187, 190,
Index 1 419
Yeats, William Butler (contint/ed) Yourcenar, Marguerite, 115,206
225,226,355; Abbey Theatre and, 249, JI 1- Yugoslavia, 27, 80, III, II3-rI5, 198
312; Belgian literature and, 248; invention of
Irish tradition and, 305-307; London critics Zangwill, Israel, 208. WORKS: Ghetto Comedies,
and, 264. WORKS: Cathleen ni Houlihan, 306; 208
Celtic 'flvilight, 306, 315; The Countess Ziorllsm, 269, 270, 392n3 l
Cathleen and UiriMIS Legends and Lyrics, 306; Zola, Émile, 19,25,26,37,98,101-102,137;
Deirdre, 397n4; Diarmuid and Grainne (with Dreyfus Affair and, 363n82; realism and, 3 II;
George Moore), 306, 389n69; Fairy and Folk theater and, 161, 162, 374n24. WORKS:
Tales of the Irish Peasantry, 306; The Wander- L'Assommoir, 102; The BeUy of Paris (Le ventre
ings of Oisin, 306 de Paris), 26; "j'accuse," 37, 98; Le Roman
Yellow Book ofLecan, 243 expérimental, I02; Les Rougon-Macquart, IOI;
Yesenin, Sergey Aleksandrovich, 134 The Spoils (La Curée), 26
Yiddish language, 200-2°3, 229, 259, 334. See Zulu language, 239, 268
also Jews Zurich, 30-31
Yoruba language and people, 227, 259, 291 Zweig, Stefan, 98
420 1 lndex
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(Pascale Casanova, M. B. DeBevoise) World Republic of Letters

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THE

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

This book was originally publis,~ed;~{Ïa république mondiale des lettres, by

Publication.of'tnis book has been aided by grants from the French

Designed by Amber Frid-]imenez

Prefoce to the English-Language Edition Xl

INTRODUCTION. THE FIGURE IN THE CAR PET

PART 1. THE LITERARY WORLD 7

1 1 Princip les of a World History of Literature 9

2 1 The Invention of Literature 45

3 1 World Literary Space 82

5 1 From Internationalism to Globalization 164

PART Il. UTERARY REVOLTS AND REVOLUTIONS 173

7 1 The Assimilated 205

8 1 The Rebels 220

9 1 The Tragedy of Translated Men 254

11 1 The Revolutionaries 324

CONCLUSION. THE WORLD AND THE LITERARY TROUSERS 348

15 IT LEGITIMATE to speak of world literature? If so, how are we to take in

Translation, despite the inevitable rnisunderstandings to which it gives

2 1 THE WORlD REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

My purpose in analyzing the world republic ofletters is not to describe

4 1 THE WORLD REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

6 1 THE WORlD REPUBLIC OF lETTERS

A civilization is a form of capital whose increase may continue for centuries.

10 1 THE WORlD REPUBlIC OF lETTERS

Principles of a World HistOly of Litera tu re 1 II

THE BOURSE OF LlTERARY VALUES

12 1 THE WORLD REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

"A civilization is a fonn of capital," he went on to say, "whose increase

Principles of a fiVorld History of Literature 1 I3

I4 1 THE WORLD REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

Principles ofa f;Vorld History ofLiterature 1 15

I6 1 THE WORLD REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

Prin.ciples of a fiVorld History cifLiterature 1 17

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Principles qfa World History of Literature 1 I9

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Cosmopolitans and Polyglots

The power of this "aristocracy" can be measured only in literary

is one and indivisible in spite ofboundaries, and literary, pictorial, and

Principles of a World History ofLiterature 1 2I

The stature of these great intermediaries, whose immense power of

these connoisseurs, these invaluable amateurs who, if they do not cre-

By virtue of the fact that the competence of cri tics is acknowledged by

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Paris: City of Literature

Princip les of a VVorld History if Literature 1 23

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This unique configuration was reinforced by literature itself. lnnumera-

Prindples of a World History of Literature 1 25

These countless descriptions of Paris-a literary genre inaugurated in

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Principles ofa VVorld History ofLiterature 1 27

Octavio Paz, in Vislumbres de la India (In Light oflndia, 1995), recalled

28 1 THE WORLD REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

This irnprobable combination of qualities lastingly established Paris,

Principles of a lMJrld History ofLiterature 1 29

we found it more difficult to be po or in Zurich than in Paris. Al-

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Principles of a World History of Literafure 1 31

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Ahl 1 would like to go to France